Reflections on a Culture of Learning and Growth: Community and Individual Paradigm Shifts:
A Contemporary, Historical, Futuristic and Personal Context

by Ron Price

PREAMBLE
PREAMBLE





This book of 450 pages and 200 thousand words(font 14) contains reflections and understandings regarding the new Bahai culture, what amounts to a gradual paradigmatic shift, in the Baha’i community. This community is now found in over 200 nations and territories on the planet often in "unassuming settings" but, still, providing "a visible alternative" to society's familiar strife.(Ridvan 2012) "To observe the Bahá'í world at work," the House of Justice wrote as recently as April 2012, "is to behold a vista bright indeed." The votaries of this new world Faith may not always be able to behold the bright vista, though, troubled as some of them are with the forcasts of despair and doom which proliferate in the print and electronic media and by the very real problems and pains afflicting millions of the world's peoples.



This new Faith is the second most widespread religion on earth. There are some cities where Bahá'ís are found in the thousands and one country where there are more than one million adherents---India. But for the most part the spread is thin and vast encompassing some 120,000 localities, municipalities, on the planet. This paradigm shift has been taking place since the mid-1990s, with its first intimations going back arguably as far as April 1988 or even the 1970s when the earliest concept of the institute first became part of the Bahá'í community's process of deepening for its adherents in some places.





This new paradgim will continue in its various permutations and combinations, its wide-ranging developments at least until 2021, if not until the end of the 2nd century of the Bahai Era in 2044. This shift will possibly find an increasing elaboration beyond 2044 into the third century of the Bahá'í Era, 2044 to 2144, as this new world Faith plays an increasing part in the affairs of the world and its peoples. From time to time in this book I make mention of the paradigm shifts in our wide-wide world as it increasingly globalizes, planetizes and becomes one world socially as it already is, to a significant extent, technologically and scientifically. Of course, the wider paradigm shifts that involve the entire planet are all very complex and these wider shifts, are not the focus of this book, although they cannot be entirely divorced from the many agencies and activities, as well as the elected and appointed arms of this rapidly expanding world religion. The programs and policies of the Bahá'í community and its 5 to 8 million adherents are now embedded in this new Bahá'í culture. Indeed, there is a labyrinth of complexity that has developed in the international Bahá'í community. At some levels this complexity is quite easy to comprehend; at other levels in is a paradigmatic shift that is difficult for all the world's Bahá'ís to take in, comprehend and work out what part they should and can play.





The Baha’i community had already put in place an evolving structural base for community building in the century before the emergence of this new paradigm. Community building became a focus for a process that the internationally and democratically elected body of the Bahá'ís, the Universal House of Justice, said began at the outset of this new paradigm in the mid-1990s. Most of my life as a Baha’i, as far back as the 1950s, and before that in the lifetime of my parents who were also Baha’is, during that first epoch(1937-1963), and its three stages, of Abdul-Baha’s Divine Plan, the major goal and emphasis was on building the structure, the institutional base of this "nascent Faith of Baha’u’llah.” The House of Justice referred to the present nucleus and pattern of the Bahá'í community in its Ridvan message of 2011 as “the harbinger of the New World Order.” "The evolving administrative structures offer glimmerings, however faint," the House of Justice pointed out, "of how the institutions of the Faith will incrementally come to assume a fuller range of their responsibilities to promote human welfare and progress."(Ridvan 2012)The human race constitutes an organic unit whose fundamental component is the individual. From a Bahá'í perspective mankind is, has and will undergo a collective spiritual evolution, inspite of what some see as appearances to the contrary. The appearnce of a Manifestation of God is the motive force of this evolutionary social process. This new Bahá'í paradigm is, at least for the Bahá'ís, as part of the core of that social process.





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Abstract:
The building of the structure of this new world Faith, a structure with many functions, was at the core of Bahai programs and policies, goals and game-plans, so to speak, from 1921 to 1996, a period of 75 years, as well as back into the 19th century
Notes:
This book of 430 pages(font 14) and 200 thousand words contains reflections and understandings regarding this new Bahá'í culture of learning and growth, what amounts to a paradigmatic shift, in the Baha’i community which it has been going through since the mid-1990s. This newest, this latest, of the Abrahamic religions, has been developing a new culture in the last two decades(1996-2016). This new culture or paradigm will be developing in the decades ahead at least until 2044, the end of the second century of the Bahá'í Era(1844 to 2044), and perhaps beyond into that third century, 2044 to 2144. Time will tell when the next paradigmatic shift will take place in the international Bahá'í community.

Comparisons and contrasts are made to several previous paradigm shifts in the Bahá'í community. Thoughts on future developments within this paradigm and future paradigms are suggested. In the first five years, 2007 to 2012, of the presence of this book, this commentary, on the world-wide-web, this work has contributed to an extensive dialogue on the issues regarding the many related and inter-related processes involved in the many ongoing changes in the international Bahai community, a community which exists in more than 200 countries and territories on the planet.

This work is dedicated to the Universal House of Justice, trustee of the global undertaking which the events of more than a century ago set in motion. The fully institutionalized charismatic Force, a Force that historically found its expression in the Person of Bahá'u'lláh, will have effloresced by a process of succession, of appointment and election, at the apex of Bahai administration for half a century by 21 April 2013.

I have also written this book as a form of dedication to, by some accounts, an estimated 25,000 Bahá'ís and Babis who have given their lives for this Cause from the 1840s to the second decade of this third millennium. I have also dedicated this book to the many best teachers and exemplary believers--those ordinary Bahais--who have consecrated themselves, indeed their lives, to the work of this Faith.

Finally, I have written this work in memory of my maternal grandfather, Alfred Cornfield, whose life from 1872 to 1958 has always been for me a model of an engagement in a quite personal culture of learning and personal growth.

This book is, arguably, the longest analysis and commentary on this new Bahá'í paradigm that is currently available in the Bahai community, although several other books have appeared since this piece of writing first appeared in cyberspace in 2007. The overarching perspective in this book is a personal one that attempts to answer the question: "where do I fit into this new paradigm?" Readers are left to work out their own response to this question as readers inevitably must, now and in the decades ahead, as this new paradigm develops a life of its own within the framework already established in the first two decades of its operation: 1996 to 2016. The question now is not "if" but "how" each Bahá'í will engage themselves, will participate, in this new paradigm as the first century of the Formative Age comes to an end in 2021 and in the years beyond as this third millennium continues to challenge all of humanity.
Classified in Essays and poetry by Ron Price
See also bahai-library.com/price_pioneering_four_epochs.



Reflections on a Culture of Learning and Growth: Community and Individual Paradigm Shifts:
A Contemporary, Historical, Futuristic and Personal Context
by Ron Price
PREAMBLE

This book of 530 pages and 200 thousand words(font 14) contains reflections and understandings regarding the new Bahai culture, what amounts to a gradual paradigmatic shift, in the Baha’i community. This community is now found in over 200 nations and territories on the planet. It is the second most widespread religion on earth. This paradigm shift has been taking place since the mid-1990s, with its first intimations going back arguably as far as April 1988 or even the 1970s when the concept of the institute first became part of the Bahá'í community's process of deepening its adherents. This new paradgim will continue in its various permutations and combinations, its wide-ranging developments at least until 2021, if not until the end of the 2nd century of the Bahai Era in 2044. This shift will possibly find an increasing elaboration beyond 2044 into the third century of the Bahá'í Era, 2044 to 2144, as this new world Faith plays an increasing part in the affairs of the world and its peoples. From time to time in this book I make mention of the paradigm shifts in our wide-wide world as it increasingly globalizes, planetizes and becomes one world socially as it already it, to a significant extent, technologically and scientifically. Of course, the wider paradigm shifts that involve the entire planet are all very complex and these wider shifts, are not the focus of this book, although they cannot be entirely divorced what the Bahá'í community and its 5 to 8 million adherents.

The Baha’i community had already put in place an evolving structural base for community building in the century before the emergence of this new paradigm. Community building became a focus for a process that the internationally and democratically elected body of the Bahá'ís, the Universal House of Justice, said began at the outset of this new paradigm in the mid-1990s. Most of my life as a Baha’i, as far back as the 1950s, and before that in the lifetime of my parents who were also Baha’is, during that first epoch(1937-1963), and its three stages, of Abdul-Baha’s Divine Plan, the major goal and emphasis was on building the structure, the institutional base of this "nascent Faith of Baha’u’llah” and what the House of Justice referred to in its Ridvan message of 2011 as “the harbinger of the New World Order.” "The evolving administrative structures offer glimmerings, however faint," the House of Justice pointed out, "of how the institutions of the Faith will incrementally come to assume a fuller range of their responsibilities to promote human welfate and progress."(Ridvan 2012)

The building of the structure of this new world Faith, a structure with many functions, was at the core of Bahai programs and policies, goals and game-plans, so to speak, from 1921 to 1996, a period of 75 years, if not in at least the quarter-century before that in the ministry of Abdul-Baha. In the last 20 years(1996 to 2016) the focus has been on "community" in addition to "structure." Of course, teaching this Faith, extending the base, the number of localities, the numerical, the statistical, foundation as far and wide as possible, making a larger group of believers, has always been high on the agenda of Bahá'í communities everywhere since the origins of this newest of the Abrahamic religions in the middle of the 19th century. The latest messages from the House of Justice, 12/12/'11, 19/1/'12, and 21/4/'12 are examples, par excellence, of this community building focus. This book attempts to incorporate messages from the House of Justice and national assemblies as they are published and as they relate to this new Bahá'í culture. The 12/12/'11 message from the House of Justice, a six page message which foreshadows many developments in the community in the decades to come, is discussed toward the end of this lengthy post at BLO. The most recent Ridvan message of 21/4/'12 I will comment on briefly in this book from time to time as I have already done briefly..

The process I have described above in a few sentences and below in many more sentences is far more complex than the simple sketch I am outlining, a sketch that goes back to the first intimations of this Order in the 1840s. “The unveiled brilliance of the gilded dome that crowns the exalted Shrine of the Bab,” which the House of Justice referred to in its April 2011 message, is a tribute, a memorial, to the memory of the Man who was martyred in 1850 for this new System with its structures, its functions, its communities, which would be initially sketched by Him Whom God would make manifest, Baha’u’llah, in His voluminous writings as well as those of His Successor, Abdul-Baha. Still, this international Bahá'í community is only glimpsing, only manifesting, the first streaks of the promised dawn that is the promise and vision within this new Order. The full force of its implications are only slowly developing within the embryo that is the present paradigm.

What I have written in the above, of course, is my own way of putting things, my own thoughts, as the rest of this now lengthy book continues to explore these thoughts, thoughts put on paper beginning in 2007 and continuing in the five years since then, years of receiving messages from the elected and appointed branches on this new world Faith. I have also drawn on the thoughts of others extensively, some who read this book will say perhaps too extensively. But I make no apologies for the ample quotations from the words of others, individuals and institutions. This book has grown over the last five years largely through the writings of others, institutions and individuals, and this needs to be emphasized at the outset. If there is any inventiveness here it is in putting the writings of others into some warp and weft, some pattern of significance to me, a pattern I hope is also significant to readers. I hope to outline some of the dynamics of light and darkness, idealism and disillusionment that are characterisitic of the revolution at the heart of this paradigm

THE END OF THE CURRENT FIVE YEAR PLAN(FYP) in 2016:

By the end of this current Plan, 2011 to 2016, Abdul-Baha’s Divine Plan will arguably be one century old and the religion in which this Plan is being put into action will have some two centuries of historical experience. Much of our knowledge in life is acquired by experience.(Ridvan 2012) The Author of the letters providing the details of the Plan for the extension of this Faith around the world, penned His first words in March and April 1916 nearly three years after returning from His epoch-making journeys to the West. Those journeys were described by Shoghi Effendi as “a service of such heroic proportions no parallel to it is to be found in the annals of the first Baha’i century (GPB,p.279) They will be both celebrated and commemorated during the first two years, 2011 and 2012, of this FYP. This Plan of Bahá'u'lláh's appointed and legitimate Successor is at the core of this new paradigm. This new Bahá'í culture is inseparable from His Plan.

It was in September 1911, when Abdul-Baha arrived in London, the city He chose, the metropolis of the British Empire, as the scene of His first appearance before the public, that His western tour could be said to have begun.(Balyuzi, Abdul-Baha, p.141) In the last century, 1911 to 2012, the light of this Cause has penetrated, suffused and enveloped many a region of this planet and this process will go on inexorably in the next hundred years: 2012 to 2112. In some ways, Abdu’l-Baha’s journey to the West simply initiated, or perhaps more accurately, extended and began to systematize a process of teaching in the West begun in 1894, if not as far back as the 1840s when the first reports of this new religion began appearing in Western newspapers. During this centenial period of that historic whistle-stopping journey, the Bahá'í community is turning again and again to Abdul-Baha's words and His emphasis on the new social forms that will emerge in this Bahá'í Era.(Ridvan, 2012)

GLOBAL DIFFUSION: A LONG WAY TO GO

The Cause has not suffused the entire planet after the passing of nearly 170 years of the Baha’i Era(BE): “that goal is far from being fulfilled.”(UHJ, April, 2011) In the course of the evolution of this new paradigm the international Bahá'í community may see that goal fulfilled. Perhaps during one of the next major shifts in the Baha’i administration’s way of going about things, so to speak, that goal will be completed. Time will tell when and how. I have no doubt that this goal will be fulfilled. My belief, like so many of the beliefs of the adherents of this new world Faith, is characterized by a sense of its inevitability. It is only a question of time in the ongoing evolution of this new world Faith, this newest of the Abrahamic religions. In many ways the work of “the penetration of that light into all the remaining territories of the globe”(UHJ, April 2011) has just begun in this first century, 1911 to 2011, the first century since the travels to the West of the Bahá'í Faith's exemplar, Abdul-Baha. As Paul Lample notes in his useful discussion of this new paradigm: “Of the more than 16,000 clusters at the start of the second Five Year Plan in 2006, some 10,000 remained unopened to the Faith and less than 2% of those that had been opened were capable of taking on the challenge of growth.” (Paul Lample, Revelation and Social Reality, Palabra, 2009, p.104.)

The implications of this statement of Lample's, of course, around the thousands of Bahai communities in dozens of countries is that the Faith has grown very slowly in many, many places and this slow growth may continue for some time in many places. It is important, it seems to me, not to infuse this new paradigm with a problem Bahai communities have had for decades: unrealistic expectation of the growth in the numbers of believers. The assumption that numbers will increase by hard work and effort is true but only partly and only in some places. In some places this assumption is warranted. The experience I have had in the nearly 60 years I have been associated with this new Faith, and the experience I am aware of from my reading and study of this Cause, leads me to have high expectations for this Faith's growth but they have become, over the decades, more realistic ones for its slow growth in many parts of the globe, if my last 60 years of experience is any judge. My experience often, but not always, makes me feel "sure-footed in the application of the knowledge I have gain through this experience."(Ridvan 2012)

The Bahai Faith has grown from some 100 thousand at the outset of the first Plan in 1937, when my parents were about to first meet and marry in the lunch-pail city of Hamilton Ontario, to some 200 thousand in 1953. That year, 1953, was a historic juncture in the history of this Cause for a number of reasons, not the least of which personally, was that my mother joined the Bahá'í Faith that year. The Bahá'í tmeple in Chigao was dedicated that year; the Ten Year Crusade was launched and the Shrine of the Bab was completed. It was a big year. This Faith now has some 5 to 8 million depending on what set of statistics one draws on. The subject of numbers, of statistics, has complex dimensions and the subject is one that seems to raise controversy from time to time due to the long-standing emphasis on numbers, an emphasis both inside the Faith and out. But in most places I have lived in my day-to-day life and in many, many places I have not lived, growth has been 'discouragingly meagre' and, from my point of view, this has been due to those unrealistic expectations. But this slow growth is also due to many other factors which this book aludes to from time to time. The whole question of the growth of this Cause is a complex one with complex answers. Peter Smith's book(2004), Bahá'ís in the West, gives an excellent overview of the growth of the Cause from decade to decade, up to 1990. I cannot do better than refer readers here to this book if they are interested in the statistical side of this new Faith up to the emergence of this new paradigm.

COMPARISONS AND CONTRASTS WITH OTHER PARADIGMS

I could make extended comparisons and contrasts between the current culture of learning and growth, the new Baha’i paradigm, and the several previous paradigm shifts in the Bahai community. I could also anticipate future developments within this paradigm and future paradigms. In spite of the enthralling, the stupendous, vision that Bahá'u'lláh gifted to the world(Ridvan 2012)of the future of humankind and my own particular proclivities in sci-fi writing this temptation is also avoided. The scope of what was originally an essay, and is now a book of more than 500 pages(depending on what font-size is used), does not allow for any detailed comparisons and contrasts with previous paradigms beyond some very general observations. The elaboration of what will clearly seem to many like the utopian visions of this world religion is also something I do not deal with. Such comparisons and such visionary statements can be found in many published Bahai works, at posts on the internet for those readers who are interested, and in the talks of various Bahai speakers--some published and some not. The Bahai vision is so enthralling that it inspires the optimist and leaves the skeptic and cynic laughing and somewhat bemused. As I say, though, I only make some general and limited comments later in this book for those readers who enjoy or who persist through these 100s of pages. The new paradigm, I should emphasize here, is best conceptualized as a mixture, a dynamic mixture, of past paradigms and present, this new Bahá'í culture. This new Bahá'í culture has not sprung-up ex nihilo. This new Baha’i culture is also not some monolithic scheme superimposed everywhere and anywhere in the same way. There is what you might call a case-specific contextualization. The new paradigm is a vast metatext in which the smaller contexts, the local communities and our individual lives, have been cast. This has been the case throughout Baha’i history, throughout previous paradigms. As we approach this new metacontext, though, we must be on our guard that we avoid what has always seemed to me to be our curious tendency towards oversimplification and absolutism when it comes to spiritual matters. Our knowledge in many aspects of the individual and society is notoriously imprecise, a fortiori, in relation to spiritual matters. Uncertainty, with its implications of trust, is our spiritual condition and it is quintessential to our spiritual development. So much of the Bahá'í journey is dynamic and continuously changing, a moving and fluctuating system, a flexible road-map to all possibilities. There is "an extraordinary rservoire of spiritual potential" available to the individual to draw on(Ridvan 2012) to help him or her act and, in the process overcome the "layered veil of false premises," the apparent "insurmountable obstacles," and "the prevailing theories of the age" which "seem impervious to alteration."(Ridvan 2012)

Unity in diversity has always been the watchword inspite of the best efforts of individuals to impose some simplistic and sterile uniformity. Each cluster, each assembly, each community, each Bahá'í, develops in their own way given the special circumstances of each individual and each community. The Baha’i community and the individuals within it in this new paradigm and in the old have been one and all expected to master worldly evils as they have gone about creating the Kingdom of God on Earth. As they have done this, of course, they have needed to reject the sins people commit, but not the sinners. We all need to do battle with our inner demons and not worry too much about the demons of others. The context for all of this are what you might call contraries which we so often try in vain to reconcile and balance: principles of mercy and justice, of freedom and submission, of the sanctity of the right of the individual and of self-surrender, of vigilance,discretion and prudence on the one hand and fellowship, candour and courage on the other.

To act in accordance with this new Faith’s teachings has always been an imperative and it has always been a challenge. This has often been against popular opinion, but it has not been against secular authority. This has often been difficult and it has required a robust optimism. This is true, a fortiori, in this new Bahá'í culture. A goodly portion of humility is also a prerequisite in the Bahá'í life since no Bahá'í knows what his or her own end shall be. This is not a religion which guarantees individual salvation through either belief or good works. The Bahá'í community and its adherents are more interested in saving the planet. The ultimate judgements about souls is left to God. There are many people in the world doing good work for humanity, but it is the Bahá'ís who have the blueprint for the erection of the dam that will in time stop the flood which, at present, threatens to engulf humankind.

This nascent Faith of Baha’u’llah, this harbinger of the New World Order, requires of the faithful to labour on His behalf to create that humane Kingdom in His behalf. Such labour requires method and system and a movement away from egocentric individual interests toward far broader tasks. This mission requires a religious obligation and ties individuals into a community. The purpose is far higher than utilitarian calculations and the pursuit of material gain. A family of trust and helpfulness exists in this community and it serves as a natural training ground for group participation skills. This training ground has an increased specificity in this new Bahá'í culture. Habits and theories of blame have no place in this paradigm but, given the nature of human beings, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the lack of personal development in many souls if not most, many obstacles limit the growth of this new culture in ways similar to the limiting factors in previous paradigms. Blame is a negative reaction to the limitations we struggle with daily, and like doubt, which undermines the very basis of that daily struggle, it is a mental habit that produced adults more aware of human weakness than human strength. There is, too, a gradual and inevitable absorption in the manifold perplexities and problems afflicting humanity as Bahá'ís everywhere try to put into place the complex structure and increasingly elaborate community at the heart of this paradigm. We are buffeted by circumstances and distracted by crises. The arduousness of the task we face in this new paradigm we but dimly recognize. It is not easy. It is very difficult. All things really worthwhile are, it seems to be just about by definition, very difficult. Much of the education most of us have is like a knife without a handle and it is, at worse, dangerous and, at best, often useless. We labour under so many misconceptions and false assumptions: literalism, the heavy burden of ludicrous expectations of others and of our own dear selves, the notion, the falseness, of a spiritual life not rooted in our animal existence, a failure to accpet that pain is always a necessary tiller of the heart's soil.


I MAKE NO PROMISES

I trust that readers who stay with this text will have some reward. Of course, as in any writing, writers can not promise and---if they do---it is either at their peril or it is because of their previous literary successes. This I can not claim due to my many unsuccessul efforts to write books and I don't like to venture into perilous territory, literary and otherwise, if I can help it. I have developed a more cautionary approach to life as I have come to head into its evening hours. In the first five years, 2007 to 2012, of the presence of this book, this commentary on the new Bahai culture, on the internet, this work has contributed its part---as some posts on the internet do---to an extensive dialogue on the issues regarding the many inter-related processes, complex structures and community functions involved in the ongoing changes in the international Bahai community in these last two decades. This book at BLO has received more than 10,000 hits which is one measure of the extent to which it has been read at least at this one site. But words, I must emphasize, are one of the leatr parts of faith; faith I have often thought is a gift to be lived and, even after several decades, I am a beginner---however much I write in this analysis of the new Bahá'í culture. I cannot give others faith nor understanding. That is their job.

THE LANGUAGE OF PARADIGMS

The language of paradigms has been used across many academic disciplines and fields of discourse to describe current and shifting understandings of knowledges, beliefs, assumptions, and practices. Thomas Kuhn (1962) made the term “paradigm” recognizable with his publication of Structure of Scientific Revolutions in the very year before the emergence of another Bahá'í paradigm in 1963---the year of the election of the Universal House of Justice in 1963. That was the same year--1962--my own travelling and pioneering for the Canadian Bahá'í community began. For Kuhn, a paradigm was a collection of shared beliefs, a set of agreements about how the world may be understood. According to Kuhn, the differences between Newton's mechanical universe and Einstein's relativistic universe represented a shift in paradigms. Each of these two approaches to physical science represented a worldview, or a paradigm, that guideed how scientists saw the world.

Hans Kung (1988), the great Catholic theologian, is among those who has applied Kuhn’s understanding of paradigms to religion. He identified several paradigms that have shaped religious history. Among recent Christian worldviews are the modern, Enlightenment paradigm and the emerging Ecumenical paradigm. In comparing these two paradigms, Frederick Schleiermacher’s (1996; 2001) contributions that shaped much of modern liberal theology have been challenged by the pluralism of more recent ecumenical and interfaith theological understandings (Cobb, 1982; Hick, 1982). The new does not replace the old, yet it does provide an alternative foundation of thought for understanding contemporary religious practices. This is also true of the new Bahá'í paradigm: it does not replace the old, but it does provide an alternative foundation, an altered, an additional, structural, institutional, organizational scheme or framework, a new language so to speak. This framework, this structural embellishment, has assisted and is assisting the Bahá'í community to deal with a multitude of functions: its emergence from obscurity and the public image it has slowly acquired in the last several decades; the new horisons and developments in the wider society; the unfolding educational processes from childhood to old age, the several stages in the lifespan, within the Bahá'í community; the extension of the Cause to every corner of the planet and the deepening of those people who are attracted to this global, this very wide-spread, religion---and much more, a more that this book discusses in its 500++ pages.

A paradigm as a worldview containing deep-seated assumptions that are so much a part of a person that it is often difficult to step back and see what the assumptions are. Such assumptions and views of the world are central to a person’s belief system and to the ways that a person lives and acts in relation to others. In some ways, as this new paradigm has evolved in its first two decades(1996-2016), Bahá'ís need to be able to practice multi-paradigmatically, to discern the assumptions most often used within the Cause as an organization and then use their critical thinking and their personal skills to move across different facets of the paradigm to accomplish goals congruent with the values, beliefs and attitudes necessary to implement the aims and goals of this new Bahá'í culture. This multi-paradigmatic perspective is useful when deciding what course of action to take when faced with the many options now open in both individual and community life in this 21st century. A new complexity has emerged both in the wider world and in the Bahá'í community. In the Bahá'í community this is particularly the result of developments in this new Bahá'í culture of learning and growth, developments that have been slowly introduced and incrementally developed. This book includes a discussion of the philosophical assumptions and the practical implications of this new paradigm since paradigms emerge in practical frameworks based on these assumptions. The multiparadigmatic perspective to which I refer is, for me at least and I hope for others, a heuristic tool for approaching so much that is found in this new Bahá'í culture.

A PARADIGM IN A MULTI-PARADIGMATIC FRAMEWORK

There are several practical and theoretical elements to think about when considering this paradigm, a paradigm which for me possesses a multiparadigmatic framework. Religion and spirituality have a range of meanings and they provide a category for understanding the context of broad and diverse spiritual and sacerdotal practices engaged in by individuals and communities. With Bahá'ís located in some 120,000 localities there is an immense diversity of practice taking place within this paradigm. The epistemology, the nature of the knowledge, that each Bahá'í has acquired and will acquire, is as varied as there are Bahá'ís. How does one know what is true or real? Traditional sources of knowledge in the Bahá'í community include: intuition, perception, testimony, experience, and rational thought. Within Bahá'í history there are four common sources: reason, revelation, tradition, and experience. There are, of course, variations on these sources and the weight they carry, with some sources dominating others. For example, the socially hegemonic force of authority is found in Bahá'í religious tradition, in what Bahá'ís call "the Writings." This is balanced by what you might call individual thought and emotion as an experiential source of knowledge. It lacks authority but it is crucial in determining what each Bahá'í does in practice. It is here that what I call the multi-paradigmatic framework is born. Here, we begin to see one important factor: the distinction between hard knowledge, which is capable of being transmitted in a tangible form, the tradition of sacred writings, and soft knowledge, which is more innate, more experiential, and more personal.

A rational, orderly approach to the new Bahá'í culture and a feeling that there is “one best way” or a commonly accepted “right way” to accomplish tasks characterize is what you might call a functionalist approach to the new Bahá'í paradigm. Most assumptions and theories that have guided Bahá'í practice in the twentieth century are also central to a functionalist approach to this new paradigm. A second approach, an interpretive approach, to this new paradigm has as its focus consensus and equilibrium but it is subjectivist in nature so that the social reality of the new paradigm for each individual is based on human experiences and these experiences exist primarily as a human, an individual, a social construct. Interpretations of what is real in life and what each individual engages in within the new Bahá'í culture reflect individual understandings and intersubjectively shared meanings. The individual Bahá'í seeks to understand written texts and his or her lived experiences as well as those of the Bahá'í community. The populations served by the Bahá'í community, what are sometimes called 'targeted populations,' those small pockets of the population which the limited resources of the Bahá'í community can focus on in their teaching and service work, are an important part of the community building process in this new Bahá'í paradigm. Each Bahá'í approaches these pockets of the population in their own way guided by the institutions of the Cause, institutions which have been around for decades and new institutional forms which have arisen only in the last twenty years and which constitute the evolving nature of the new paradigm.

As part of this multi-paradigmatic perspective to which I refer above, Bahá'ís must watch that no trace of paternalism, superiority or prejudice comes into their interaction with others or estrangement and disaffection will result among those whom they want to teach/reach. This is not an easy call; much of the work in the Cause is not an easy call. It never has been. Rather than seeing the new culture's issues in black and white terms, there are many Bahá'ís who are more comfortable with many shades of gray and they see themselves and their roles in this new paradigm in many different ways. What I seek in this articulation of the context of this new Bahá'í culture is a basis for universal participation. Volition and choice, a variety of lines of exploration and walking the path in the company of others in different ways, are all part of this interpretive approach.(12/12/'11)

Another approach to this new paradigm might be called the radical humanist. With a focus on emancipating the human consciousness, a major concern of this paradigm, in this context, is releasing human development from the constraints of the status quo. Postmodern philosophers who concentrate on individual changes rather than social change, including Foucault (1980) and Derrida (1981) may be relevant to this approach to the new paradigm. Due to their generalizing nature, few theoretical perspectives are found in this approach; rather, the individual focus of emerging spiritual, transpersonal and holistic practice modalities align with the assumptions of this approach. If a Bahá'í values the subjectivity of the interpretive approach, but feels that the change emerging from the understanding of the community consensus doesn’t match their own understandings and he or she sees contradictions which they cannot resolve, then the change-oriented and consciousness-raising relativism of this approach may be a more appropriate fit. This is a complex idea to which I hope to return at a future time here at BLO.

The multiparadigmatic approach offered here reflects one understanding of the complex intersections of theory and theology as well as the integration of the individual and the community, the institutions and the immense variety of Bahá'í groups. With the knowledge and expertise that individuals develop, as well as their own understandings, hopefully each person will find a heuristic for considering the problems and successes of this new Bahá'í culture from diverse perspectives. I feel that the information in this multiparadigmatic framework can be of value to individuals who seek to put into place this new culture. This understanding of paradigms may serve as a teaching tool for promoting increased self-understanding, for conducting organizational analysis, for evaluating practice theories, and for discussion related to the integration of everyone into a system of universal participation---what has been an elusive goal in the Bahá'í community for decades. The philosophical assumptions can be utilized in conversations about self-awareness and a more professional use of self in community, so to speak. The continuums or the spectrums of approach to this new paradigm, can also be of value in framing our thought and practice.

This framework may also serve to aid in understanding differences and similarities among Bahá'ís and the assumptions of each Bahá'í about the world and society. Any time we say or hear, “Well, God expects us to....” “The Writings say....,” or even, “the new paradigm demands..." we have an opportunity to reflect on our assumptions, and this matrix of paradigms provides a tool to aid us in considering these things. Whether used in teaching human behavior, practice or reflection, in discussing the relationships between faith and knowledge, or in introducing teaching in relation to different religious perspectives, this framework can be built into existing tutor and study circle practice in an effort to encourage students to consider the role of our many underlying assumptions that often go unnoticed and unmentioned.

THE CONCEPT OF A LEARNING COMMUNITY

The concept of the learning community has been promoted in many places in recent decades. Educational effectiveness is enhanced when people are part of a learning community. The Bahá'í community is not a classroom, but it is a social environment, and each member of each Bahá'í community has psychological and cognitive, sociological and historical understandings, personal constructions of knowledge which depend on relations with others. Bahá'ís are engaged in community building and aim to create a safe environment for their learning community, for taking risks and for authentic collaboration. In this new paradigm the perception of individuals that they are members of a community and this membership is the basis for their collaborating and learning is important. The community provides its members with shared goals and culture, a shared feeling of being part of a greater whole. The ability to negotiate meaning, and the ability to reproduce the community through acquring new members is part of the group ethos and experience. Mutual support among community members or communities of learners, has long been considered beneficial in the Bahá'í community long before this new paradigm.

The sense of community affects the success of all programs. Understanding what is meant by community can be challenging, as members do not always have the same definition of community as they go about their work. Community has been described as shared experiences in which both individual and group needs are met, either linked to a place and time or transcending place and time. Another way of seeing a community is as a group of individuals interacting and connecting with each other either through formal or informal organizationat activity. The presence of experienced community members provides the learning context for new members as they enter.

Teachers or tutors can engage students or participants in a process of mutually negotiating the norms and values of the learning community. Empowering members to establish the criteria for designing and assessing their learning community has its theoretical foundation in constructivism. The perspective supported by constructivism states that the instructor is a facilitator and the learner is an active constructor in knowledge creation. Similarly, the recently popular concept of the “guide on the side” encourages increased interaction among participants, with the tutor stimulating consultation as needed.

Members of a Bahá'í community are almost always given the opportunity to assess their experience. Teaching and learning do not always consist simply of the teacher’s planting knowledge in the student’s garden. In this new paradigm all Bahá'ís learn from each other. Further, having students self-assess is a skill they may have to do professionally, since giving and receiving feedback is a vital part of social work practice. The study presents the results of a community-building exercise in which three cohorts of students create the assessment standards and later use the standards to assess faculty and their peers.

COMMUNITY BUILDING AND HOUSES OF WORSHIP:

With the construction of the last of the continental temples in Santiago under way, the initiation of projects for building national Houses of Worship offers yet another gratifying evidence of the penetration of the Faith of God into the soil of society. The House of Justice made this point in its Rivan 2102 message. They went on to say that "the Mashriqu'l-Adhkar, described by 'Abdu'1-Baha as "one of the most vital institutions of the world", weds two essential, inseparable aspects of Bahá'í life: worship and service. The union of these two is also reflected in the coherence that exists among the community-building features of the Plan, particularly the burgeoning of a devotional spirit that finds expression in gatherings for prayer and an educational process that builds capacity for service to humanity." In that same message the Bahá'í community was informed that they were "entering into consultations with respective National Spiritual Assemblies regarding the erection of the first local House of Worship in each of the following clusters: Battambang, Cambodia; Bihar Sharif, India; Matunda Soy, Kenya; Norte del Cauca, Colombia; and Tanna, Vanuatu." To support the construction of the two national and five local Mashriqu'l-Adhkars, a Temples Fund at the Bahá'í World Centre has been established "for the benefit of all such projects," and "the friends everywhere were invited to contribute to it sacrificially, as their means allowed."(Ridvan 2012)

THE INTERNET

The following passage from Century of Light(p.133), published in 2001 was prescient of developments that have taken place bothin the the Bahá'í community and in the wider world: “The system, so prophetically foreseen sixty years ago by Shoghi Effendi, builds a sense of shared community among its users that is impatient of either geographic or cultural distances.” This description of the sense of shared community created by the internet was clearly, as I say, a prescient insight into the evolution of internet use worldwide. It is interesting to note that Friendster began in 2001, Linkedin and Myspace in 2003, and Facebook in 2004, and that statement in Century of Light, that analysis, preceded the social networking revolution. This book itself is part of that revolution in communication in the last two decades, decades synchronizing with this new Bahá'í culture.

The information revolution set off in the closing decade of the 20th century by the invention of the World Wide Web transformed irreversibly much of human activity. Internet communication, which has the ability to transmit in seconds the entire contents of libraries that took centuries of study to amass, vastly enriches the intellectual life of anyone able to use it, as well as providing sophisticated training in a broad range of professional fields, again, for those with the interest. The system, as I say, so prophetically foreseen many decades ago by Shoghi Effendi, builds a sense of shared community among its users that is impatient of either geographic or cultural distances. It is this shared community that I have drawn on in my own work both inside the Bahá'í community and out---especially in cyberspace---in these years of my retirement from FT, PT and casual-volunteer work.

In the first year after I retired from FT work, July 1999 to July 2000, Google officially became the world's largest search engine. With its introduction of a billion-page index by June 2000 much of the internet's content became available in a searchable format at one search engine. The new Bahá'í culture had then just finished its first Plan within this new culture of learning. In the next several years, 2000-2005, as I was retiring from PT work as well as casual and most volunteer activity, that had occupied me for decades, Google entered into a series of partnerships and made a series of innovations that brought their vast internet enterprize billions of users in the international marketplace. I was one and I became a published author more extensively than I had ever been with thousands upon thousands of readers.

Not only did Google have billions of users, but internet users like myself throughout the world gained access to billions of web documents in Google’s growing index/library. The information revolution set off in the closing decade of the 20th century by the invention of the World Wide Web transformed irreversibly much of human activity. Internet communication, which has the ability to transmit in seconds, as I say, the entire contents of libraries that took centuries of study to amass, vastly enriched the intellectual life of anyone able to use it, as well as providing sophisticated training in a broad range of professional fields, fields that I was very interested in exploring, have done so and will do in the years ahead. It was a finer and more useful library than any of those in the small towns where I would spend my retirement in the years ahead in the third millennium. It was also a library with a myriad locations in which I could interact with others and engage in learning and teaching in ways I had never dreamt of in the first five decades of my life as a student and teacher: 1949-1999, and the first four decades of my life as a Bahá'í: 1959-1999.

This new technology had also developed sufficiently to a stage, as I say, that gave me the opportunity, the capacity to post, write, indeed, “publish” is quite an appropriate term, on the internet at the same time. From 1999 to 2005, as I say, I released myself from FT, PT, casual and most volunteer work, and Google and Microsoft offered more and more technology for my writing activity for my work in a Cause that I had devoted my life to since my late teens and early twenties. But, most importantly, I was able to teaching the Cause in direct and indirect ways, more extensively than in the first forty years of my membership.

THE INTERNET AND GLOBALIZATION
The Internet has become emblematic in many respects of globalisation. Its planetary system of fibre optic cables and instantaneous transfer of information are considered, by many accounts, one of the essential keys to understanding the transformation of the world into some degree of order and the ability to imagine the world as a single, global space. The Internet has widely been viewed as an essential catalyst of contemporary globalisation and it has been central to debates about what globalisation means and where it will lead.

MILLIONS OF READERS: AN EXERCISE OF PERSONAL INITIATIVE

There are now several hundred thousand readers, as I say above, engaged in parts of my internet tapestry, my jig-saw puzzle, my literary product, my creation, my immense pile of words across the internet--and hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success possible. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft cover publishers, where it had been without success when I was employed full time as a teacher, lecturer, adult educator and casual/volunteer teacher from 1981 to 2001, these results would never have been achieved.

I have been asked how I have come to have so many readers at my website and on my internet tapestry of writing that I have created across the world-wide-web. My literary product is just another form of published writing in addition to the traditional forms in the hands of publishers. The literally hundreds of thousands of readers(perhaps even millions since it has become impossible to keep even an accurate account of all those who come across what I write and see the name of the Cause) I have at locations on my tapestry of prose and poetry, a tapestry I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft across the internet, are found at over 8000 websites where I have registered: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views. They are sites to place essays, articles, books, ebooks, poems and other genres of writing. I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed the many forms of my literary output there and engaged in discussions with literally thousands of people, little by little and day by day over the last decade. I enjoy these results without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success.

The internet is a cornucopia of accurate, well-argued and knowledgeable information. But it is also a place for specious and spurious, inaccurate and beguiling arguements. People who know little about an issue are often easily taken-in on the internet. Many often believe a u-tube post they can see to one that requires study and reading on their part. The internet, like many forms of technology before it, is both boon and beast, asset and debit, to the lives of its participants. Indeed, a quite separate section of this book could be devoted to the negative and positive impacts of cyberspace, a space which has itself developed a whole new world---a new technological paradigm--during the first two decades of this new Bahai paradgim.

SOME CRITIQUES OF THE CAUSE IN CYBERSPACE

Some writers with an axe to grind, so to speak, earnestly seek to present their views of this new Faith as a detached commentary on a body of neutral "facts." They often appear in the guise of dispassionate scholars and commentators with their years of patient research or extensive community experience. The concluding or continuing efforts of their literary careers are found increasingly in cyberspace. Their posts often begin with an assertion that they are writing for the purpose of presenting in a concise and orderly fashion the facts which have been established, or other trustworthy scholars have established. Their posts so often end with the measured question "can the Bahai World Faith be an adequate religion for the world today, and for the millennium to come? Their magisterial judgement is often "decidedly negative." Their opinions of Bahai administration and Bahai community often leave this reader wondering if the community they are writing about is the same one I have been a member of for half a century.

At the same time, after decades of participation in many different Bahai communities, I have seen many a person join the Cause, become disillusioned and leave. I have seen many become so critical of others and of Bahai institutions that they find it very difficult to see the wonders and beauties of this Cause. When one becomes a Bahai the tests often come hard and fast, as Abdul-Baha said they would as far back as 1911 before He began his western tour. The frustrations involved in teaching this Cause also add to the mix resulting in an emotional over-boil, so to speak. The result is negative posts on the internet by frustrated and discouraged Bahais, x-Bahais, disgruntled Bahais, inter alter.

Often the posts and articles, essays and think-pieces of various writers on the world-wide-web have an air of thoroughness and authority. Where matters of belief and religious practice are discussed, the author's own opinions are closely woven into the fabric of quotation and reference. The most damning conclusions are presented in a tone of surprise and regret. Sometimes the writing is heavily footnoted, drawing on an apparently wide range of sources; and sometimes it is not. A degree of animus is often unmistakable, an animus often deriving from some experience in Bahai community life which, as I say above, has left the author cynical and skeptical, if not totally disillusioned. In an international commuity of millions of souls it is not surprising that some of its members lose whatever passion of belief they once had. Such disillusionment happens to people in all groups, to say nothing of disillusionment that sets into the lives of those who never join a formal group.

DEDICATIONS

This work is dedicated to the Universal House of Justice, trustee of the global undertaking which the events of a century ago set in motion. The fully institutionalized and legitimate charismatic Force, a Force that historically found its expression in the Person of Bahaullah, will have effloresced at the apex of Bahai administration by a process of succession, of appointment and election, for half a century in a little more than one year from now--in the period 21 April to 2 May 2013.

I have also written this book as a form of dedication to an estimated, by some accounts, 25,000 Bahais and Babis who have given their lives for this Cause from the 1840s to the first decade of this third millennium. This dedication includes the many best teachers and exemplary believers--those ordinary Bahais--who have run this marathon of the spirit, consecrated themselves, indeed their lives, to the work of this Faith before they continued their marathon and stepped into the worlds of light in the mysterious country beyond.

Finally, I have written this work in memory of my maternal grandfather, Alfred Cornfield, whose life from 1872 to 1958 has always been for me a model of an engagement in a culture of learning and personal growth. Undisturbed reading, research and writing time made my grandfather happy and it has made me happy, especially in the evening of my life.

A LIFETIME OF LEARNING

The traditional division between work and play does not really apply in the context of my life these days of my retirement after a working life of 40 years: 1959 to 1999. In his autobiography Johann Wolfgang von Goethe(1749-1832) warned his readers that what they wish for in their youth they may get in their adult life. I have spent a lifetime, my adult life, learning and I am grateful that my fate has given me precisely that. It was something I wished for in my youth: something I could throw myself into with passion and intensity to fill my spirit to overflowing. This something came into my life by sensible and insensible degrees during the years of my adult life: early, middle and late adulthood, the years from 20 to 40, 40 to 60 and 60 to 67, respectively. This lifetime of learning was also the central means I found to serve this Cause for I was: a teacher and lecturer, a tutor and adult educator, among many other roles, for some 40 years. In my many educational roles, it was a quintessential necessity that I became a learner not only from books but from my students. I also became, by those same sensible and insensible degrees, a writer and author, a poet and publisher, an editor and journalist, independent scholar and researcher with an obsession, what became a type of compulsive creativity. Some have blamed, indeed I often think this is the case, the source of this tendency on my bipolar disorder(BPD). That may be partly true. I have written a 190 page book here at Bahai Library Online(BLO) on my experience of BPD if readers want to follow-up on this idea. In all of these roles, among others, I have been able to serve the Cause sometimes with satisfaction and sometimes with confusion and bewilderment. As it says in the Quran the pen of a scholar is more valuable than the blood of a martyr. This is an interesting concept which I will leave for a more detailed discussion.

FINDING YOUR NICHE

Finding a niche within which to serve this Cause is a sine qua non for all Bahais: for the veteran and the novitiate, for those who were Bahais before this new paradigm and for those who entered the Cause after those fin de siecle years of the twentieth century when this new paradigm found its inception. Although the niche in which I now serve the Cause is one heavily laden with print and communicating with others in cyberspace, I long ago learned to avoid the vice of scholars to suppose that there is no knowledge of the world but that of books. "The most learned," that fine essayist William Hazlitt once observed, "are often the most narrow-minded." Having spent many years in institutions of higher learning I am more than a little aware of this reality.

This new paradigm provides a multitude of niches; indeed, this book argues that everyone can find a niche if they want to be active agents of their own learning, if they want to engage in some pattern of action suited to their own personality constructs, if they want to be involved in what has become a complex of networks in a growing new religion with an important part to play in the unification of the peoples of the world. Some of those who are at present wholly unaware of Bahaullah's coming and who are not acquainted with the society-building power of this Faith will, in the years ahead, enter into conversation with Bahais and come into contact with this new culture of learning and growth which has been so painstakingly developed in the last two decades: 1996-2016, and its several global Plans. This culture of learning is part of a global entreprise of personal concern now to millions of adherents of this Cause. Indeed, the well-being of the total human family and the individual families of the Bahais are interlocked in a common concern, in a communitas communitatum, a community of communities.

THIS BOOK: AN OVERVIEW

This book is, as far as I know,the longest analysis and commentary on this new Bahai paradigm that is currently available in the Bahai community. The overarching perspective in this book is a quite personal one that attempts to answer the question: "where do I fit into this new paradigm?" Readers are left to work out their own response to this question as readers inevitably must now and in the decades ahead as this new paradigm develops a life of its own within the framework already established in the first 20 years of its operation: 1996 to 2016. By the end of the current Five Year Plan: 2011 to 2016 this new Bahai culture will have been developing, as I say, for two full decades. The question now is not "if" but "how" each Bahai is to engage themselves, to participate, in this new paradigm, this system of limitless potentiality. This is a work that I like to think is of value to anyone who has ever thought at all about this new Bahai culture and who would like to think about it more deeply than he or she has thusfar.

Still I have little doubt that the mass of humankind, as well as the Bahai community, will eat, drink, sleep, and perform their many and diverse tasks, and do as their lives dictate by circumstances and creativity, desire and duty, without casting an eye on this book. They will care nothing for my scribblings and enthusiasms as well as whatever carpings and quibbles are found here. In spite of what I like to think are my finely-spun distinctions, interesting theories and lines of analysis and demarcation that I include in this work, many will never see them. This is partly, if not significantly, due to the great mass of information now available. We in the West face a print and image glut. I would argue there are many useful lines of thought here, but these pages will not possess, for many a reader, any advantage over their own wit, genius, shrewdness, or melting tenderness. Sometimes, of course, they will; sometimes they won't. With some two-thirds of the world still without access to the net and with most of the several million Bahais engaged in activities other than reading extensive postings like this one, I have no illusions about the impact of this work. As I say above: this book has had some ten thousand clicks over five years, a needle in a haystack of cyberspace.

BURGEONING RESOURCES AND THE NEW MEDIA

Ours is a world of burgeoning sources and resources from the print and electronic media, of that print and image-glut. A writer like myself should have no illusions about the popularity of his work which is but a drop in the ocean of visual and auditory material and their worlds which threaten to swamp, to inundate, the average person who seeks to get a handle on the plethora of issues facing him and his society. The new media of which the world-wide-web is but one, if important, part, holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device. It can also provide, on many occasions, what is now called interactive user feedback. This is a form of creative and often critical participation. It is also an aid to community formation and consolidation around the media content and around the planet; as well, it might be added it is an aid to of divisiveness and fractured community.

Another important promise of what some now call the New Media is the "democratization"---the creation, publishing, distribution and consumption of media content. The rise of this new media has increased communication between people all over the world in cyberspace through the Internet. It has allowed people to express themselves through blogs, websites, pictures, and other user-generated media. As a result of the evolution of these new media technologies, globalization occurs much more extensively. Globalization consists of more than just the expansion of activities beyond the boundaries of particular nation states. Globalization shortens the distance between people all over the world by the speed of electronic communication. These activities and processes have all taken place in the background, in the wider society, and a part of this new Bahai paradigm.

PERMISSION TO PUBLISH ON THE INTERNET

I have been given permission by the Review Office of the NSA of the Bahais of the USA to publish my autobiographical writing on the internet. That Office pointed out to me several years ago that, if I wanted to put this writing in the cover of a book, I would have to go through a further process of review. In Australia, no process of review is required on the world-wide-web. Much of this book is simply a literary instrument tempered in the crucible of my experience, an experience of this Cause going back to the beginning of the ninth stage of its history, the years 1953 to 1963, what was and is called the Ten Year Crusade, the third stage of the first epoch of Abdul-Baha's Divine Plan. This Plan could be said to have now witnessed several paradigmatic shifts since its inception in 1919 and its systematic implementation after a hiatus of well-nigh two decades---in the first Seven Year Plan of 1937 to 1944. That first Plan had more than a little importance to me because it was then that my parents met and married and I was born.

INTERPRETATIONS AND CONTRADICTIONS

However personal my perspective may be I want to emphasize that no single perspective is adequate to the task I have set myself in this book. The storey, the narration, of my own experience is an interpretive one, a refashioning so to speak of my past and not a simple mirroring of what I have experienced; it is a refiguring and an updating. Standards are various, the actions and events of individuals and communities are many-faceted and the most important activities often proceed from mixed and complex motives of individuals and groups. My language and my approach is intended to open-up a multiplication of meanings. The result I am sure will be for the reader a tension between what he or she expects of this book and what they experience as they read its many pages. I feel somewhat like the poet W.H. Auden who was fond of quoting the woman in the Forster novel who said: “How do I know what I think until I see what I’ve said.” This book is, then, a thinking out-loud.

Because of the contradictions and complexities of social life everything that happens to individuals and groups depends on the specific context in which the events of life are embedded. In many ways it becomes nearly impossible to predict how individuals and groups will behave or what outcomes will extend from deliberate organizational policy. The role of social scientists in general, and sociologists in particular, as one of the many engineers of the future often dissolves into a much less attractive role as professional doubters and critics. Some people, then, come to see such critics and skeptics, such commentators and analysts, as unfaithful members of the community who are not responding the way they are supposed to respond to the directives of the Supreme Body. Awareness of the paradoxical character of many institutional policies, much of the social and organizational structure and the nature of group dynamics leads naturally, at least to people like myself and others who come across what I write, to caution. The critic is often aware of this and some members of the community come to see him or her as a threat to the general orthodoxy of the way policies and programs are supposed to be implemented. I do not see myself as a threat; indeed, I see what I write as part of the very warp and weft of this new paradigm. I see this book as part of the exercise of my individual initiative in the promotion and the consolidation, my service activity and my social activism in relation to this wondrous Cause.

MESSAGE TO CONTINENTAL BOARD OF COUNSELLORS: A SPECIAL FOCUS

As the House of Justice pointed out in its 28 December 2010 message to the Conference of the Continental Board of Counsellors assembled in the Holy Land: "opportunities afforded by the personal circumstances of the believers..dictate how the process of growth begins in a cluster." What often happens, the Supreme Body went on to say more than a year ago now: "follows no predetermined course." In this message of nearly 10,000 words, a message that continued to define and describe, outline and analyse this new culture of learning and growth, the House of Justice responded to the concerns and criticisms, the problems and exigencies of the international Bahai community in implementing this new Bahai paradigm, as it did in previous letters and messages in the ongoing process that is this new Bahai culture. That December 2010 message is but one of a long series of messages from the House of Justice to assist the Bahais of the world to implement the Divine Plan of Abdul-Baha which He began to write between 26 March and 22 April 1916. I refer to this message again from time to time in this book as I try to integrate both the House of Justice messages, the general body of the Bahá'í writings and the words of many others that are now found in books and in cyberspace. As the last weeks of the last year of this current FYP come to an end in April 2016, this Divine Plan will be 100 years from its initial drafting by its Author.

THANKS TO DR. MARK FOSTER

I want to thank Dr. Mark Foster, a professor of sociology in Kentucky, for the ideas contained in the following paragraphs. Indeed, in some ways, this book is a pot-pourri of ideas, as I indicated above, gathered from others. Acknowledging as one must that individual narratives and experiences are inexact and perspectival, as illustrated by the parable of the blind men and the elephant, and allowing for diverse, even contradictory, divine and human reality constructions, one should simultaneously recognize, even advocate and celebrate, a radical multidoxy or polydoxy of variegated Baháʾí faiths. These groups, some which even function presently, would consist of Baháʾís who, while accepting the authority of the Baháʾí primary sources, may differ in their relative understandings of, or approaches to, certain substantive issues. By the same token, one should also have reason to expect a similarly radical orthopraxy of covenantal obedience which contrasts with orthodoxy, an emphasis on a correct belief, activity. Orthopraxy places emphasis on correct action, activity, or practice and not on rituals. Right belief is combined with right practice, with the emphasis placed on the latter. Some of this language and these terms were especially used in Latin American liberation theology, often in contrast with an orthodoxy that is seen as insufficiently interested in the practical and political content of faith.

The aim is, to put some of these ideas another way, "to reach a common vision for the growth of the Bahai community and discuss strategies for action and help the friends to steer away from thinking merely in terms of the mechanics of projects and to infuse their plans and subsequent action with the spirit of the Faith."(UHJ in Bahai Canada, April 2011, p.23) We all need to "learn to read our own reality and see our own possibilities as well as make use of our own resources."(UHJ, 28/12/'10) Part of this common vision is our belief in the mysterious power of spirit and its existence as an integral element of our universe. This leads us into behaviors which are sometimes essentially irrational from a material perspective. A consequence of the fact that we believe in strange and almost indefinable entities like: soul, spirit, indeed, a whole range of abstract forms--is that our teachings call upon us to behave in ways which are strange, somewhat bewildering and, indeed, in the too-hard-basket for the society around us, if not for us as well, from time to time.

BLIND FREDDIE

The inevitable contradictions between, often within, certain faith-based scriptures can only be resolved in the linguistic texts of religiously authorized interpreters: in the case of our Faith, the Bahai Faith, by the House of Justice. For some believers resolution, inevitably, will not and does not, take place. In an organization of millions of souls in which there can not be some rigid imposition of formulase, protocols and processes; in which there can not be a simple emphasis on technique; in which the spirit of the law is often more important than its letter; in which an unintentional stifling of personalities results from dominating personalities; in which temporary imbalances and stumbling blocks are part and parcel of any learning process; in which tendencies to overinstruct and dangers of complacency exist because teaching and learning are rarely perfectly executed processes, indeed, are highly subtle and complex; in which unmet needs and a haphazard, hasty and controlling atmosphere is often found in communities--with all these realities as part of community life at various levels from the local to the international community---not everyone is going to be happy with things all of the time. Even blind Freddie could see this!

This entire culture, this immense and complex Bahai machinery is a means and not an end. Some souls do and will get disgruntled; some have left and will leave the Cause; some will take years, if not decades to join; some will never join; some will show complete indifference and even opposition; indeed, the range of reactions to this wondrous Cause is as varied as there are Bahais and as those who are outside its formal institutional boundaries. The laws, principles, and exhortations of the Cause are not translated into practice in a fixed and inflexible manner, a code that determines what must be done in every circumstances. A very wide area is left to the conscience of the individual and binding pronouncements are only made on details which are considered essential.

The Baháʾí Faith advocates a prima scriptura, that is: the written text first, more than a sola scriptura, that is: only the written text, scriptural hermeneutic. Thus, Martin Luther’s view of sola scriptura would establish the sovereignty of individual exegesis over the authority of Rome. He objected, not to tradition per se or to using interpretive tools external to the Bible, but to the sola ecclesia, an "only the church", approach to texts in the Roman Catholic Church. Baháʾís, in both their study circles and as individuals, are not sola scriptura, in the manner of Luther or the Protestant Reformation, in that they accept the authority of the Guardian to interpret and the authority of the Universal House of Justice to legislatively elucidate. Bahais have a living canon. On the other hand, given the right to personal interpretations or understanding of Sacred Texts in the Baháʾí community, the Bahá'í community has nothing quite like the traditional sola ecclesia approach of Roman Catholicism either.

SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT AND SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION

The methodology of spiritual development in this new paradigm involves the radical deconstruction of one's old mind, including its socially scripted patterns of reactions. Given that individuals habitually react to situations from their human imperfections, and if they desire to escape these socialized, reactive constructions of the mind, they must, each time, fall into the habit of pausing, reflecting, and making a spiritually informed, salutary decision. Through this means, and by associating with a community of like-minded souls, their reactive constructions can, reaction by reaction, be progressivelly conquered and replaced with the spiritually proactive constructions of a new mind. Of course, even blind freddie would realize that this is a process and it takes a lifetime. For some, the process seems to work faster and, for others, often the process seems to be so slow as to give the appearance that nothing is happening at all. Spiritual transformation has its mysteries and is only partly quantifiable. The mind of man is like a clock that is always running down, and requires to be constantly wound up. The heart is more like a pump that runs out of renewing blood and requires to be constantly refreshed. We all have quite different clocks and pumps.

The character and temperament of individuals, such has been my experience, often possess the same image and quality as he or she grows and is strengthened with the years. In this sense, as in Mr Wordsworth's phrase, "the child is the father of the man" makes this point in another way. The same tendencies may not always be equally visible, but they are still in existence, and break out, whenever they dare and can, and often even more for being checked. Again, we often distinctly notice the same features, the same bodily peculiarities, the same look and gestures, in different persons of the same family; the colour of our lives is woven into the fatal thread at our births: our original sins, our socialization, and our redeeming graces are infused into us; nor is the bond, that confirms our destiny, ever cancelled. Transformation possesses continuities as well as changes in personality. To expect otherwise is often to court disappointment. The whole notion of transformation is a topic unto itself which I only occasionally refer to in this book. This book is not essentially one of psychology, although I make use of this important discipline in the social sciences from time to time. To expect to be able to locate a manual with a series of simple steps to achieve transformation is also to court simplicity's many problems. The House of Justce, the Guardian and theCentral Figures of the Cause have made mention of this fact on many occasions in Their voluminous writings. Whom the gods would destroy they first make simple, then simpler and simplest!

THE ROLE OF CRITICS

Despite the many limitations of the roles of critics in Bahai community life, their role often seems preferable, at least to them if not to others, to that of the enthusiastic but naive visionary. The skeptical stance of these critics can lead, under certain conditions, to a more sophisticated understanding of the culture under consideration: in this case the culture of learning and growth in this new Bahai paradigm. And believe me this new paradigm has had its critics as this Cause has had its critics far back into the recesses of its first two centuries. The process of march and victory has not been without crisis and calamity, themselves often produced by savage and unfriendly critics who would do all in their power to frustrate the aims and objectives of this new and revolutionary world encircling Faith. The stimulus in this Cause, the stimulus towards civilization and culture grows stronger in proportion as the environmnet grows more difficult. This is equally true at the individual level where "whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth." This new Bahai culture is certainly providing that stimulus, as many millions are finding out.

THE POWER OF UNDERSTANDING AND THE CRITIC

This new Bahai culture will provide what this Faith has always provided for its adherents: the power of spiritual understanding which surpasses, in the end, any materialistic understanding or ideological power and authority. It provides the basis for true civilization, the secret of Divine civilization. Here the story has been long and it will play itself out for many decades and perhaps centuries to come in a host of complex patterns and ways. This Faith does not provide a quick fix to the problems of the world and their staggering complexity inspite of the apparently simple core belief of "one God, one religion and one humanity." Slogans, often used by political parties and the many isms and wasms in the world, to bring simplicity to complex issues, are the last thing this new Faith needs to secure the belief of the seeker and the skeptic. Millions do battle with the phantoms of a wrongly informed imagination, as the House of Justice pointed out in their 1999 Ridvan message and these same millions, that Supreme Body goes on to say, "are ill-equipped to interpret the social commotion at play throughout the planet as they listen to the pundits of error." It is for reasons like these that the House of Justice in December 2011 cautioned those who would work in the junior youth programs not to dilute the educational content into "a mesmerizing sea of entertainment."

The institutional policies that are aimed at enriching that culture of learning and growth can often be understood with more clarity by the enlightened critic because he or she is not blinded by excessive enthusiasm and unreasoning religious zeal, by an ignorance of the importance of moderation and taking one's time and by little knowledge of the history of the Cause. If he or she keeps himself informed, well-read in the writings of the Cause and develops qualities which will attract the hearts of others; if this said critic does not try to stamp all situations with universally applicable blueprints, bluepints that are often the products of his own imagination and sense of self-importance; if that same critic scrupulously avoids the glorification of the self and the bolstering of the ego in the name of confidence-building(UHJ: 12/11)---he or she can contribute enormously to the consultation on whatever the issue is being reviewed in: the cluster, the assembly, the registered or unregistered group, the committee, or simply in some informal discussion. The wider community can benefit from honest and sincere criticism; indeed it should be open to criticism. This book deals with this issue of criticism at some length if readers persist or just use their word-processing tool and scroll through all the references to the subject in these 420 pages. The section devoted to the work of Dr. Irving Janis in this book is especially pertinent in this regard. The entire subject of criticism, though, is complex and needs much more attention than I give it in this online book.

A relentless questioning of the initial blueprints and an examination of the various contingencies at each step of program implementation in this paradigm, or in relation to any policy and program, can be very helpful to the institutions whose role is to implement policy. In particular, this approach, this questioning, should not be seen as rat-baggery since it often results in two eventualities. First, change proceeds in measured and unmeasured steps, with close attention to fortuitous events and pressures from outside forces; second, one must know the actors involved and their actual goals in order to anticipate the reactions of people to external interventions. As the House of Justice, and before that Supreme Body, the Guardian of the Faith, to say nothing of each of the Central Figures of the Cause as far back as the 1840, have emphasized and reemphasized the importance of questioning---and especially self-questioning can not be over-estimated.

Without the painstaking searching involved in trying to understand human situations, the context in which plans and programs are intended to take place, no matter how much effort, no matter what the organizational blueprint, no matter how well it is devised, the results will often be discouraging and they will often come to no fruit. Hopes will completely vanish as they have for individuals in the Bahai community since its inception more than a century and a half ago. How often has the very life of a Bahai community been exterminated by dogmatic assertions, fixed points of view and rigid attitudes, among other sources of extermination, lack of fertility and stasis. Narrowness of vision and intolerance toward differing points of view have often produced and will continue to produce sterile relationships; religious habits of mind often have little to do with essential truths. A religious habit is often not the same as a spiritual attitude. This is a subtle and complex process which I do not intend to elaborate on here, but it is important in our understanding and execution of this new paradigm.


THE GUARDIAN AS CRITIC

The Guardian, himself, in his review of Nabil's narrative and its 600 pages, makes some telling criticisms of the Babis which I would encourage any enthusiast of the new Bahai culture of learning to examine for what may very well be some telling comparisons and contrasts between this paradigm shift in the 3rd millennium and that paradigm shift which took place in the middle of the years 1844 to 1850 or 1852. The Guardian concludes, though, on very high notes as he always does after informing the Bahai community through his wise exegisis(Nabil, 1974, p.652 and following). I do the same in this book for this book is essentially a pean of praise for the new Bahai paradigm inspite of appearances to the contrary, appearances which some readers have already found objectionable as they travelled through the text of this work. This work below is entitled: Reflections on a Culture of Learning and Growth: Community and Individual Paradigm Shifts: A Contemporary, Historical, Futuristic and Very Personal Context

REVISIONS TO THIS BOOK

Some of the revisions to this text as a result of feedback have been concessive but none, at least thusfar, are defiant. I am neither unconcerned about how this book is received nor am I unresponsive to what reception it receives once I am aware of some specific reaction. Not everyone puts down in writing what they think of this book nor of any other book for that matter. Indeed there is, for the most part, what you might call a languid indifference of private life to the musings of writers of books of this nature, indeed, of any nature. In a world like our own with its booming and buzzing confusions, its powerful and pervasive media intrusions, its frenetic passivities and its multitude of forms of hype from the print and electronic worlds which surround us, any writer who expects a serious view of his work on the part of masses of people, inside or outside the Cause, is barking up the wrong tree. People may enjoy or be critical of a book but the exchange of views, except in the occasional journal review and in the occasional comment on the internet, is largely left to informal exchanges between individuals, exchanges which are verbal and not written---and when they are written they so often die a quick death due to the failure of the author to incorporate what is often good advice into the text of his work. Here at BLO it is possible for readers to make suggestions to writers and for writers to have these views incorporated into the text. This is true in this particular book and has been true for the last five years.

MY AIM IN THIS BOOK

My aim in this book is to be true to my own leanings which I trust will impart direction, movement and life to this work and prevent me from being overwhelmed by the minutae of historical and geographic, sociological and psychological, statistical and philosophical facts. Over the last 20 years I have heard and read many a criticism of the Ruhi, the institute, program. Readers here will find no criticisms of this new Bahai culture from my pen, although I do point out some of the criticisms of others. My Bahai library is one in which there are some twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again. These are not the only ones that I have a desire to read, but they are old friends. I do not think altogether the worse for a book for having survived the author a generation or two. I do not have more confidence in the dead than the living. Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes for me: the deep and meaningful and the peripheral. Of the first I also read and reread, and of the last I virtually ignore. Given the burgeoning nature of the print that is becoming available we each have to choose the library of books, of print, with which we will engage. This depends on many factors, factors which are different for each of us in this new paradigm.

All these details, these reflections, on my reading should give those who come across this book some idea of my personal activity within the Bahai culture, new and old. As that fine British essayist William Hazlitt once wrote and I paraphrase: "the dust, smoke and noise of many modern books have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality." But, I must add, many modern books do have, for me, an air of immortality and this new Bahai culture of learning, in addition to the Ruhi resources, has a rich reservoir of reading far beyond anything available in any previous paradigm.

Readers will not find in this book a systematic, a detailed and organized history of the last 15 years, the first decade and a half of this new paradigm. Nor will readers find a systematic study and analysis of the new Bahai culture of learning and growth at the centre of this paradigm. The history of this Cause over its first 15 decades(1863-2013) is also far beyond the scope of this work, although I allude to it from time to time to illustrate some point or other of the Bahai story and its teachings. This culture of learning is set in an historical context and it is important to get a handle on this context to appreciate the setting in which this new Bahai paradigm has been introduced.

There is no unity of form and content in this now sprawling book. It is, rather, a sort of pot-pourri of thoughts in which performance struggles with ideal, a personal and quite idiosyncratic ideal. I try to handle divergent and often unfocussed material and bring it into the light of day, a light for my own use as much as the use of readers. I trust readers will not find the series of thoughts, gestures and episodes which follow too unconnected. The messages of the Universal House of Justice and the International Teaching Committee as well as the letters and internet posts of many individuals and institutions from the elected and appointed sides of this Faith have provided more than enough systematic and organized commentary on this new paradigm. The materials I have had to work with are far from scanty. The perfections and imperfections of the inspired as well as the uninspired followers of Bahaullah both illuminate and cast a shadow over this history and the present implementation of the current paradigm. As I point out elsewhere in this book, the pot-pourri of information now available, especially on the internet, is often erroneous, fallacious, false, hollow, idle, illogical, and inaccurate. What is often unsound, untrue, vain, and simply wrong becomes, in the hands of those with casuistic skills, a distracting, diverting and beguiling set of words that manipulate the ignorant and uninformed.

THE WILL AND TESTAMENT OF ABDUL-BAHA

In less than ten years the Baha’i community will have spent a century “beneath the benevolent shade of the Will and Testament,”(UHJ, April, 2011)a document one commentator described as “the charter of world civilization, the Bill of Rights of all mankind.”(David Hofman, 1982, p.9) But “we stand too close,” wrote the House of Justice in 1969 in relation to that same document, “to the beginnings of the System ordained by Baha’u’llah to be able to fully understand its potentialities or the relationships of its component parts.”(UHJ,Messages: 1968-1973, 1976, p.44.)

100 YEARS OF BAHA'I HISTORY

As this paradigm was opening in 1996 the Bahai community had just completed its first 100 year history in North America and was about to complete its first 100 years on the European continent. Other continents and other countries each had their own story, their own history, most less than a century of Bahai experience. It is not the purpose of this book to explore those histories. I leave such historical study to readers with the curiosity and interest. I make mention of this brief timeline, though, to provide a cursory historical perspective on where this new paradigm fits into the overall history of the Bahai Faith, a history one could arguably take back to the time Shaykh Ahmad left his home in northeast Arabia about the time of the French revolution in 1789 at the very beginning of some versions of what is called modern history. It is a history, too, which in at least 100 countries only goes back to the Ten Year Crusade making the Bahai experience in at least half the world a period of about half a century.

WHO IS WRITING BAHA'I HISTORY?

This history is also, I want to emphasize, one that continues to be constructed, interpreted, created, forged, fashioned, defined, produced and formulated within this new paradigm as this new Bahai culture establishes greater and greater social and community cohesion. This new Bahai paradigm also plays a continuing historical role in the legitimation of the Bahai authority structure and helps to create a variety of cultural frameworks at local, cluster, regional, national, transnational, intercontinental and global levels. Bahai tradition is an ongoing phenomenon both its creation and the meaning it has to the present Bahai community; it is crucial to the construction of the international Bahai community at all levels. The House of Justice, through its many letters, plays an ongoing role in what might be called the live broadcasting of history. It produces an experience through its many communications where private and public moments, where history, present activities and future plans coalesce into one ongoing narrative. It is a narrative that is an authorized interpretation; it enjoys the imprimatur, the stamp of authority, the acknowledgment of the body of the Bahai community that this is the straight path, this is the set of principles in this Cause and how they apply in today's world, in the Bahai community in which they are currently being implemented in the context of this new Bahai culture.

Although reports of the Babi Faith, the critical precursor of the Bahai Faith, and especially Bábí persecutions appeared in the European press from 1845, and although Bahá'u'lláh resided on European soil in 1863-8 in the course of his final exile to Palestine, it was not until 1898 that the first Bahá'í group was established in Europe. From small foundations in Paris, Bahá'ís from Europe have distinguished themselves in many ways in the international Bahá'í community. This book does not attempt to survey some of the unique features of that regional community or the Euro-centric communities in our global world. Nor does this book review some of the Europoean Bahai community's distinctive contributions to the development of the Bahá'í Faith in the decades of the systematic execution of Abdu'l-Bahás Plan: 1936 to 2013. Nor does this book attempt to review the special developments in the amazing last half-century, say, 1963 to 2013, in other parts of the world since many territories were first opened in that astounding 10 Year Crusade: 1953 to 1963. All of this history, though, sets the stage, the setting, the mise en scene, as it were, for the most recent developments in this new paradigm in a religious community now of several million members spread across the face of the Earth.

PARADIGMATIC CHANGES IN BAHA'I HISTORY

Paradigmatic changes occurred during the more than two centuries, 1753 to 1996, that take one back to the earliest settings for the matrix of the Babi-Bahai Faiths. Nabil, that useful historian, traces the years 1753 to 1853 in his seminal historical work, but they are not explored in this book except, occasionally and in a cursory fashion, in order to place this new paradigm in what I hope is a helpful perspective. This book is, in the main, about the last 15 years, the closing years ahead of the first century of the Formative Age, the decade 2011 to 2021 with an eye cast into the vision of this Faith's and this Formative Age's second century, the years beyond 2021 within this new paradigm. But this book does not survey, except in the briefest of ways, the immense shifts that have and are taking place in our global society during this new paradigm. Nor does this book focus on the "matrix within which a world spiritual civilization will gradually mature."(Ridvan 2012)

SHIFTS IN THE WIDER SOCIETY

The shifts in the wider society cannot be ignored, indeed they often play a crucial if indirect role, as this new paradgim struggles to be put into place across the dozens of countries and thousands of Bahai communities. We cannot divorce this last decade and a half, either, from the wider historical setting out of which this new paradigm emerged. The vision of the future is also critical, as I emphasize in this book, in examining this paradigmatic shift. As John Hatcher has spent three books emphasizing, Bahai history provides a metaphorical, a mythological framework, for the interpretation of the time we live in and the Bahai paradigm that will be with us for perhaps some decades to come. That metaphor and its myriad of meanings is one of the core features of the lives of Bahais since those fin de siecle years when this paradigm emerged. Each Bahai must and will, each in their own ways, make of this metaphorical reality their own meaning. I can only point the way to Hatcher's extensive commentaries on the Bahai revelation and leave it to readers to make of them what they will in this new Bahai paradigm as each Bahá'í and each reader here seeks to implement this new culture in their own ways and their own lives.

The success of any organization carries with it the need to continuously redefine its strategy in order to progress. The Bahai Faith, as a religious organization has redefined its strategy many times in the 15 decades of its existence(1863 to 2013). The many results of these shifts are evident both in the world, in Bahai history and in much that I have recounted in this book. I do not recount them all; indeed, I recount very few and, as in many aspects of this analysis, I leave it to readers to understand, to analyse and to figure out what it all means. For we are, in the end, each the author of our own meaning systems, the significance of our own experience, in this new world Faith. Many meanings are never complete unless they carry within them the seeds of other meanings.

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS

At this critical juncture in history and in the Bahai community perhaps the most important question facing each of us is whether or not we can begin to ask the correct questions soon enough and provide for our individual lives the correct meanings soon enough to halt the deadly consequences of asking the wrong questions and finding the wrong meanings, of taking the wrong actions and of not really understanding the nature of this new Faith we belong to. In this book I do not address such questions and such meanings in any depth. There is an increasing literature, a literature that has been coming on stream especially in the years of this new paradigm. Again, each reader is on his or her own here as we are so much of the time even after all the messages from the Supreme Body have arrived in our hands, all the writings of the Central Figures have been spread before us on our book shelves and we have come home from all the meetings, deepenings, study circles and Feasts.

METAPHORICAL NATURE OF BAHA'I HISTORY

Bahai history provides metaphorical and mythological stories which can, if understood, provide powerful forces for the motivation and justification for the individual behaviour and collective activity of the groups in which they are told and retold. They provide, in other words, existentially meaningful narratives to help people deal with the present and the future. Put another way, this history and these stories can exist within webs of significance that determine what we should value and what we need to learn to value. Thereby, through their mediations, these ritualised story-telling performances significantly contribute to socialising us in our present day to day lives. It is precisely because culture's many forces, of which these stories are but one, matter so much that culture deserves full critical attention. This book gives that attention to culture, the new Bahai culture of learning and growth.

FREEDOM AND COMPLEXITY IN THIS NEW PARADIGM

At the same time, as the philosopher Merleau-Ponty pointed out half a century ago, there is no way of living with others which takes away the burden of being the person you are, that takes away either the responsibility and the freedom which allows you to have an opinion; there is no ‘inner life’ which is not a first attempt to relate to another person. In this ambiguous, ambivalent, partly polarized position, we can never know complete rest. Life has a heavy side to put this in simple terms: he aint heavy; he's my brother, as the song says. But life has a million other sides which are expounded in religious and philosophical books, novels and works in the many humanities and social sciences. Both subjectivity and the social construction of our reality are cultural impositions and they can not be wished away. They form the introspective and interpersonal core of this new Bahai paradigm. The fear of giving offense and the ease with which we are often offended often tend to limit if not destroy sincerity, and without sincerity there can be no true enjoyment of society, nor unfettered exertion of intellectual activity.

As one noted poet once remarked: sincerity tastes of pain, and it is better to be sincere about our douts than hypocritical aqbout our faith. And pain, the philosopher might argue, is preferable to oblivion--although not always and for everyone! The art of life in community is often to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much. The capacity to endure, the sacrificial mode and manner so to speak, is not the same in each individual. Over many decades of one's Bahai experience one usually finds the limits of one's devotion, of one's capacity to suffer for the Cause. Some, though, seem to have an unlimited capacity; perhaps they are the martyrs. Some, too, pursue the aims of the Cause under a myriad social and economic guises. All of this, and many other variables, make community life the complex phenomenon that it is. It also helps to make the growth of the Cause the complex entity, the enigma, that it is for the believers--both the veterans and the novices.

Humans have a degree of freedom but its extent is nowhere near to the level which millions believe or would like to be the case. Our destinies are, in my view, significantly and essentially conditioned by the structures internalized within us and the communities of which we are a part. Thus, free will is relative, relative to social structure and far from being an absolute freedom. Freedom operates within certain parameters, parameters of which we are often unaware on the one hand or too much aware on the othger. One of the essential goals, both now and in the decades ahead, must be the establishment of a more humane system of normative coercion based on a consultative and volitional unity in diversity. To do this we need to be able to make and break patterns ceaselessly in our efforts to find ways of expressing the purity of the Cause through word and deed. Most of us are so preoccupied by our own patterns. Although this is an aspect of our creativity, it is also and often a tragedy because so many of our patterns are self-suffocating. We seem to be singularly inept at breaking out of our patterns, pattersn that have resulted from the forces of socialization, habit and the simple need to survive in a complex world. An acute level of self-scrutiny is required.

This consultative and volitional framework, this structure of complexity, is behind this new Bahai paradigm. And it is an evolving complexity. Members of the community need to avoid the tendency to speak more and more in terms of simplifying slogans. "The habits the friends are forming in study circles," the House of Justice emphasized in 2010, "to work with full and complex thoughts" are necessary "to achieve understanding and to extend the work of the Faith to various spheres of activity. "Closely related" to this question of complexity and simplifying tendencies, "to the habit of reducing entire themes into one or two appealing phrases," the House continued, "is the tendency to perceive dichotomies, where, in fact, there are none. It is essential that ideas form part of a cohesive whole. Sometimes ideas need to be held in opposition to one another, to contain the maximum paradox. We are each and all a bundle of contradictions and our power to survive and revive our civilization depends on our ability to find structures capable of serving our individual and social needs. The new culture of learning is just that, but it will take some time before its uniquely flexible and disturbingly comprehensive system evolves into a form capable of sustaining and supporting conflicts without abdication or compromise. For more on these fascinating themes I encourage readers to go to Bahiyyih Nakhjavani's writings, especially her Four On an Island.

SHORT TERM AND LONG TERM GOALS

And so it is that short-term goals and activities are important to us, but so also the the long-term perspectives. As Peter Khan pointed out at the end of a talk he gave in 2006: "it’s an expression of zealotry to say, “Forget the long-term; only focus on the short-term.” Such an expression is a confusion between priority and exclusivity. Our priorities are the objectives of the current Plan. But that is not all; that is not exclusively the whole story. We should maintain the richness of our diversity of Bahá’í expression and activity so that we are prepared for the distant future in 20, 30, 40, or 50 years. In this way we will be able to meet the needs of the Bahá’í community at that time. We have to prepare now by addressing the long-term as well as the short-term.

CONSTRUCTIONIST THEORY

As I have contemplated and analysed this new Bahai culture over the last several years I have come to see it in terms of a constructionist theory, that is, a theory which holds that humans are social constructs and that their institutions of all sorts are constructs upheld by humans acting according to their images of what reality is. I reproduce and transform the Bahai paradigm in personal terms as I shape my daily activity. This new paradigm provides for me one of the critical constructs through which I envisage and reproduce my reality. As I see this new Bahai paradigm, in order to understand the individual, one must begin with the synergetic concept of social structure, on both the macro and micro levels. In a psychologistic society, such as exists in the West, conceptualizing social structure as a force which dominates, and acts over and above, any individual influences, is difficult for people to internalize.

THE ADVICE IN THE WRITINGS

This book also attempts to deal with the many difficult and human tendencies that militate against the carrying out of the advice Abdul-Baha gave in His Tablets of the Divine Plan for the spread of His Father's Cause. It was advice that is as difficult to implement in this new paradigm as in the old. The tendency to argue and prove one is right, the tendency to stay in ones place of residence either by birth or immigration surrounded by hundreds of Bahais and the simple tendency not to follow the many, many injunctions, wisdoms, forms of advice and guidance given in the Writings. There is a very strong tendency to invent a false, unrealistic and finally justified, image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world, not guilty as others are, but justified in the sins one inevitably commits because one does not want to admit to the many omissions and commissions in life which become part of ones journey over the years. At the opposite end of the self-image continuum there is a strong tendency to underestimate one's self. Getting the balance right is no easy game, task or exercise. We each must deal with this struggle all our lives and there is an extensive literature both within the Cause and without to help us here.

SELF-C0NCEPT

"The degree to which our self-concept is false," writes William Hatcher(Bahai Studies,V 11, p.21) "is the degree to which we will experience unpleasant tensions and difficulties as we become involved in various life situations." We are all a mosaic of true and false, real and unreal. Often it is our self-righteousness that leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself but of the nature of man and the cosmos. The mythologist Joseph Campbell, argues this in his works on mythology. One cannot emphasize all of this too much as one goes about dealing with this new Bahai culture as this book attempts to do.

RELIGION IN OUR GLOBAL SOCIETY SINCE 9/11

In the years of this new paradigm and especially after September 11, religion has become an ever more vital, and contested, part of the many national cultures across the world. The aftermath of September 11 has not seen a re-assessment of what legitimately constitutes the domain of the religious or the spiritual. But it has seen an emphasis on the political implications that stem from religious belief. Debates over abortion, gay marriage, terror legislation, Israeli settlements, Middle East policy and so on are inflected with religious beliefs and practices, yet these debates so often take religious positions as given. The terms shift depending on the context, of course, but there is a marked tendency to take religious beliefs as unified positions, static and fixed traditions—becoming variously: religious/secular, Christianity/Islam, Judaism/Islam, East/West, and so on. Both atheists and religious adherents make this presumption, the former from a disdain of religion that often simplifies in order to rebut as outmoded and the later in advocating the eternal, fixed truths of religion. All of this makes the extension of the Bahai paradigm into the teaching fields difficult for the individuals working to share the message among their contemporaries. The domain of the religious has become a complex, divisive and more emotive field for Bahais actively involved in their new paradigm of learning and growth.

But the industry and zeal of individual Bahais will diffuse this Cause even more than that industry and zeal has diffused it in the more than a century and a half in which it has been taken to the remorest and fairest regions of the world. After the evolution of 15 decades(1863-2011) most--if not all--of the Bahai principles are accepted everywhere as the voice and example of enlightenment. This is not true in an overt sense: these principles are not seen as Bahai principles as such but as expressions of advanced and enlightened civilization wherever such civilization exists. In this complex world where the forces of traditionalism and obscurantism darken the horizon, of course, many of these principles have yet to be recognized.

THE SEARCH FOR A NEW VOCABULARY

What I do in this book is to complicate the discussion and many of the matters even more substantially by pointing out how the sacred and profane have become so very entangled within one another. We have lived in an age with many labels: modernist, postmodernist, transmodernist. Our world has many isms and wasms. There are labels which seek, which seem compelled to formulate, a new vocabulary. However suggestive much of the new terminology may be it is graphically, hopelessly,inadequate to grasp the reality of the experience of our time. Since at least the 1950s, since at least the beginning of the Ten Year Crusade and the passing of Shoghi Effendi to the years before and within this new paradigm, more than half a century, we have lived in an age in which the roots of faith in large parts of the planet have been severed. In other places these roots have spread even deeper while the trees they still feed have become mundane and irrelevant to the needs of a bewildered humanity. This issue of modernity and traditionalism is far too complex to deal with here in any degree of depth, but it is part of the essential socio-political milieux in which this new paradigm exists and is trying to fertilize the world with its new Bahai culture.

METANARRATIVES AND POLARIZATIONS

One of the characteristics of this age, too, is that it has collapsed the many polarized, binary, distinctions between, say, high and low culture or the religious and the secular. This, of course, has not happened for everyone and everywhere. I do not want to make of this book an object of extraneous complications but, as I proceded along the path of its 420 pages, I may have made its content unduely complicated to some readers. In the process I'm sure I will have lost some of those who started out in this work with some enthusiasm. That is a common experience when reading a book. A writer can not win all those readers who come across his work and who begin with an optimistic fervour in its opening pages.

It should not be surprising that many other social distinctions and differences, what are sometimes called worldviews or metanarratives should also have collapsed in this age. This age is one which, in some ways, is without faith, and in other ways, is characterized by a plurality of faiths as I have intimated above. No society can long endure without faith. The enduring legacy of the twentieth century is that it compelled the peoples of the world to begin seeing themselves as the members of a single human race, and the earth as that race’s common homeland. As they do this, millions still cling to cosmologies with a narrow ecclesiasticism, a religious exclusivism and fundamentalism.

Despite the continuing conflict and violence that darkens the horizon, prejudices that once seemed inherent in the nature of the human species are everywhere giving way. Down with these prejudices have come barriers that long divided the family of man into a Babel of incoherent identities of cultural, ethnic or national origin. That so fundamental a change could occur in so brief a period—virtually overnight in the perspective of historical time—suggests the magnitude of the possibilities for the future. I quote, in the following paragraphs, a statement from the Universal House of Justice in 2002. These paragraphs provide a useful backdrop for much of the work in this new Bahai paradigm.

ORGANIZED RELIGION IN OUR WORLD

"Tragically, organized religion, whose very reason for being entails service to the cause of brotherhood and peace, behaves all too frequently as one of the most formidable obstacles in the path; to cite a particular painful fact, it has long lent its credibility to fanaticism. The dark past has not been erased, nor has a new world of light suddenly been born. Vast numbers of people continue to endure the effects of ingrained prejudices of ethnicity, gender, nation, caste and class. All the evidence indicates that such injustices will long persist as the institutions and standards that humanity is devising only slowly become empowered to construct a new order of relationships and to bring relief to the oppressed."

"A threshold has been crossed, though, in the years from the appearance of the Bab and Bahaullah in the 19th century up to the emergence of this new paradigm from which there is no credible possibility of return. Fundamental principles have been identified, articulated, accorded broad publicity and are becoming progressively incarnated in institutions capable of imposing them on public behaviour. There is no doubt that, however protracted and painful the struggle, the outcome will be to revolutionize relationships among all peoples, at the grassroots level. As the course of civilization demonstrates, religion is capable of profoundly influencing the structure of social relationships. Indeed, it would be difficult to think of any fundamental advance in civilization that did not derive its moral thrust from this perennial source. Is it conceivable, then, that passage to the culminating stage in the millennia-long process of the organization of the planet can be accomplished in a spiritual vacuum? Part of the filling of that spiritual vacuum is the work of this new Faith in the context of its new culture of growth and learning."

"It is evident that growing numbers of people are coming to realize that the truth underlying all religions is in its essence one. This recognition arises not through a resolution of theological disputes, but as an intuitive awareness born from the ever widening experience of others and from a dawning acceptance of the oneness of the human family itself. Out of the welter of religious doctrines, rituals and legal codes inherited from vanished worlds, there is emerging a sense that spiritual life, like the oneness manifest in diverse nationalities, races and cultures, constitutes one unbounded reality equally accessible to everyone. In order for this diffuse and still tentative perception to consolidate itself and contribute effectively to the building of a peaceful world, it must have the wholehearted confirmation of those to whom, even at this late hour, masses of the earth’s population look for guidance. This diffuse and still tentative perception will also be consolidating itself at the grassroots level where Bahais all around the world will be working with others to contribute effectively to the building of a peaceful world."

"The Bahá’í community has been a vigorous promoter of interfaith activities from the time of their inception. Apart from cherished associations that these activities create, Bahá’ís see in the struggle of diverse religions to draw closer together a response to the Divine Will for a human race that is entering on its collective maturity. The members of the Bahai community will continue to assist in every way they can in the years of this new paradigm not only to stimulate the development of interfaith activities but, indeed, a range of social and economic projects far more in both quantity and quality than those initiated in the international Bahai community in the previous epochs of its existence." This notion of maturity also needs to be given a context since for many it does not mean what is used to mean. Maturity used to mean the ability to get along independently in society as it is, conscious of one's moral responsibility. So often in recent decades the word maturity has come to mean, to be defined as, the emotional disposition to subject society as it is to radical criticism and to help in the work of changing it according to one's own view. This often happens in Bahá'í communities.

"With every day that passes, danger grows that the rising fires of religious prejudice will ignite a worldwide conflagration the consequences of which are unthinkable. Such a danger civil government, unaided, cannot overcome. Appeals for mutual tolerance can not alone hope to extinguish animosities that claim to possess Divine sanction. The crisis calls on religious leadership for a break with the past as decisive as those that opened the way for society to address equally corrosive prejudices of race, gender and nation. In matters of conscience the world is waking-up to a wide cross-section of social issues aimed at serving the well-being of humankind. At this greatest turning point in the history of civilization, the demands of such service could not be more clear. “The well-being of mankind,its peace and security, are unattainable”, Bahá’u’lláh urges, “unless and until its unity is firmly established.”"

THE TRANSMODERN AND THE POSTMODERN

Contemporary culture in developed countries has become soaked through and through with simulacra or images which some theorists--and I for one borrowing the term from Mark Foster--describe as transmodern. This is as true for the sacred as it is for the profane. The process has resulted in an increase in the complexity of social phenomena as individuals try to make sense of their culture and seek answers to the dilemmas of their lives and their society. This transmodern thought in the decades preceding this new paradigm and in the decades in which this paradigm is taking place in history has challenged and is challenging the assumptions and approaches of all systems and collective approaches to human endeavour. In the process, transmodernism has opened the way for new and more effective orientations to be established for people to deal with their worlds. These new orientations also lie at the backdrop of the cultures within which Bahais, acting within this new paradigm, will develop new directions of activity, thought and imagination.

In the Bahai community these new ways will all be part of this new Bahai paradigm. This is at least one of the possible, the many, contexts in which to analyse the emergence of this new Bahai culture in the last 15 years. In some ways this modern world of image-glut and the many forms of media underline the notion that life is but a show, vain and empty, bearing the mere semblance of reality, like a vapout in the desert which the thirsty dreams to be water. The complexity and confusion of the real world lies behind the world of fantasy created for us by these media. This world of fantasy often seems more real that the real world which seems increasingly unreal. All of this, too, underlines what for the Bahai is reality: the inner life and private character--his thought. What matters is our personal singularity of thought, analysis and language behind the hyperreality and the images, the excesses and the speed of meaning and events, the spectacles and the horrors as well as the information and knowledge explosion.

Instead of attacking the paucity and inadequacy of the modern, postmodern or transmodern worldviews—which is the standard move by spiritual and new-paradigm advocates—it is perhaps more useful to reformulate and reconstruct the premodern interpretations of religion in light of developments in this tenth stage of history. There are enduring fundamentals of the premodern, modern, and postmodern forms of religion which contain truths which are perennial but not archaic. As social beings, learning takes place as we come into a tension with the social structures around us. But to become engaged in any activity in society one needs to develop a sociological imagination and avoid conceptualizing one's experiences in purely personal categories. Rejoicing in a unity in diversity is the sine qua non without which only an anarchous society prevails. At the centre of this sociological imagination is a powerful ideology that can serve as a cultural base for our social structure.

This new Bahai paradigm offers a framework for this ideology, a framework for the social construction of reality within which we as Bahais can live and have our being. The notion that every question has a noble answer or that there are reliable structures of ideology to believe in wholeheartedly has become, at best, quaint in these fin de siecle and 3rd millennium years. Some believe that the once-relied-upon audience of learned readers has disappeared, giving way to a generation desensitized to complex argumentation by television and the Internet. This is only partly true for their are millions more readers now and millions can handle human and intellectual complexity. Ideologies still abound in our world and the Bahai Faith offers yet one more. Many a soul goes down before his or her intellect and is imprisoned behind a wall of rationalization. The skeptical ego and the proud intellect must solve their own problems in their own way. One's spirit and one's mind can not force itself upon others but must be invited. Others must make their own preparation; we cannot do it all for them. The power of the Cause is an impersonal one and we cannot see it as our own spiritual, personal, power. This is a subtle and dangeous development that happens all-too-easily in the lives of believers. The Most Great Prison is more than a place in Bahá'í history. It is part of this new paradigm as we all carry around the prison of self, the darksome well which we build through our vain imaginations. It is the blind pit of our idle fancies which we dig over and over again.

THE CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY

The concept of ideology is used in many ways in social science literature. In one of the main ways it refers to the values, the attitudes and the world of thought or understanding of the world which the majority share. In this sense, ideology is the worldview of a group at a particular time and historical period. In practice, then, the concept of ideology refers to worldviews and structures of meaning in a certain socio-cultural context, as to what is considered to be important or make up correct descriptions and standards for collective and/or individual actions.

The single individual's frames of understanding and value systems for the social world are thus considered to be the result of mirroring the frames of understanding and values which dominate on the collective level. The concept of ideology refers then to how a society at the collective level understands, conceptualizes or describes the material and social world. This collective level is then laid down or mirrored in the individual's consciousness.

This new culture of learning and growth is, in fact, a micro and a macro-society that is both a web of consciousness and an imaginative framework. The restoration and the acceptance of the many approaches to truth as well as the acceptance of transcendent reality itself cannot be accomplished by engaging in ideological warfare. Dogmatic battles between ideologues who assert propositions as evidence of the truth of their ideology will not reestablish consciousness of transcendence. More philosophically-minded individuals will recognize that the preconditions for rational debate include the acceptance of human experience and transcendence. "Questions of social order can be discussed rationally only if the whole concept of the order of human existence, of which the social order forms a part, is viewed in its entirety and right back to its transcendental origin." The failure to accept this condition is precisely what Eric Voegelin called logophobia and what he understood as at the core of what has corrupted the modern world. There are many ways of describing or accounting for this 'corruption.' Science can not deal with moral values, nor can it provide ultimate purpose for human beings because it cannot determine the nature of man. When the motivation to avoid what is forbidden is weak there is a storng temptation to live, not by the Decalogue, but according to the 11th commandment: thou shalt not get caught. To appoint reason as the ultimate arbiter and ruler on earth is tantamount to abandoning everything to caprice. As Schopenhauer emphasized that the concept of 'ought' cannot be based on reason, on some categorical imperative, some sense of human dignity. These are empty phrases, cobwebs and soap-bubbles when divorced from a metaphysical base. It is this metaphysical base which is at the centre of this Bahá'í paradigm, as it has been at the centre of this relgion for more than a century and a half. Bahá'ís in trying to extend their Faith to others have an uphill battle laying the foundations in the lives of others of this new metaphysical base.

THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE IN THIS NEW PARADIGM

In this new Bahai paradigm there is a strong, an important, relation between public issues and private troubles, between community problems and personal difficulties. There is an equally important relationship between the larger historical scene at all levels of society and the inner life of the individual. Each individual in this paradigm is involved in an experiment that helps to shape the society, the culture, of learning and growth that is this new paradigm. Each individual is involved in grasping both history and biography; he or she is intimately involved in Bahai history and the history of his society and the stories of his own life and the lives of others: biographies and autobiographies. This complex of polarities, of biography and history, of society and autobiography is at the centre of each of our journeys in and through this new paradigm. In addition, the final battle of Armageddon turns out to be a war not between nations but within our own selves. It is not waiting to be fought. It is already upon us and we have been engaged in this battle for some time. All attempts to base morality and politics on worldly intelligence are built upon illusions, as Max Horkheimer, one of the founders of the Critical Theory in sociology has argued. But try to get this idea out there in the public domain where there is only a multiplicity of non-obligatory values and opinions. The consensus omnium is weak and unstable and it is this aspect of society, a highly vulnerable and pluralistic miliex, that makes teaching and consolidation work in community life the struggle, the battle, that it is. A society without taboos and a binding system of values cannot function properly, indeed, cannot continue to exist. Without the roots of faith, no society can exist. It best it is moribund. An obligatory ethic and a common sense of purpose are essential and conveying this, this unified Weltanschauung in which science and religion go hand in hand, to our contemporaries is no easy task. I have been tyring for more than half a cnetury, both before and during this new paradigm. This has been at the heart of my silent war, a war without weapons and guns, swords or uniforms.

Each Bahai is, in the end and in their own way, oriented to this new paradigm as one of their central and continuing life-tasks. Each Bahai is called upon to understand the nature and drift of this new paradigm, the shaping of its forms and the meanings of its increasingly complex structures and processes, relationships and activities as well as their relevance to the wider society in which they exist and attempt to serve and act. All the other major orientations--political and religious--have virtually collapsed as adequate explanations of the world and of ourselves. Although they have collapsed, they are still drawn on and discussed; they still fill the public space in the print and electronic media and they can not be ignored by the individual Bahai as he or she sets about integrating the new Bahai paradigm into the wider society of which it is a part.

This new paradigm does not assign labels or crystallizations of opinion into such contending and contentious, predetermined and fixed positions and polarities as: conservative and liberal, deepened and uninformed, veteran and novitiate, radical and progressive, active and inactive. It is a paradigm in which human beings, each human being, investigate reality, seek to interpret and understand it, and then act/s in such a way to achieve consensus and shape social reality. Knowledge and reality in this new paradigm are intimately tied to language and to Bahai culture, to the transcendent and to a moral cohesion at the centre of this community of communities, this culture of learning and growth.

This knowledge and this reality are tied to experience and are sensitive to context. They are also tied to theory and, at least for me and for my purposes, universal norms deriving from the transcendent myth which is at the core of Bahai ideology. Our personal knowledge and the theory we draw on are both part of a never-ending process of investigation, of study, and of learning. The certitude which Bahais possess in this paradigm is one of belief in the goals, methods and teachings, but it is not a certitude based on some set of absolutes and its base in factual knowledge. The norms within this new paradigm are functional and native to the process of experience. They are not, as I emphasize in this book, arbitrary absolutes that uphold some set of categorical imperatives which call down fire from heaven. Our ends, our goals as Bahais, should not be confused with complete objective reality. They are purely functional and relative. Reality, one could say, is like a white light and this light is broken into the prism of human nature and its spectrum of values, values that are derivative aspects of the same reality. We try as far as it is humanly possible to avoid arbitrary orthodoxy. Our values should aim at a tolerant assertion of preference not an intolerant insistence on agreement of finality. "We must spurn the temptation," the House of Justice warns us in hits Ridvan 2012 message, "to insist on personal opinion." Bahá'í institutions must seek to nurture and encourage not control" the behaviour of individuals.(Ridvan 2012). Cultural similarities must be discovered beneath deceptive but often superficial institutional divergence.

UNCERTAINTIES DOUBTS AND ENTHUSIASMS

There is always some theoretical doubt as we travel the road of dialogue. Faith implies doubt. The grasp of truth for the Bahai lacks certainty's assurance, its totality of conviction. The grasp of truth, though, is not a totally arbitrary one; nor is it associated with an irresponsible freedom. There is always a theoretical uncertainty even with the surest of statements. It is the explicit awareness of this uncertainty which is, in some ways, the greatest asset for Bahais in adapting to their human situation (Bahai Studies, Vol. 2, p.9). That road of dialogue or that journey in Bahai community life is one we know more about by having traveled it year after year than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.

The uncertainties I refer to above, though, should not result in some reluctance to express wholehearted enthusiasm. Nor should they result in an avoidance of the total response of the heart. This new Bahai paradigm invites a totality of response unchecked by any "maybe," as Bahiyyih Nakhjavani writes in her analysis of "Artist, Seeker and Seer."(See: Bahai Studies,V.10, p.3) For me, as I go about implementing this new paradigm, my imagination works in two contexts, at two levels of consciousness so to speak. In one of the contexts I see my life and the new Bahai culture as a house, a body, a landscape and sometimes a suburb, a space in which I move with a storehouse of images, very crucial images made up of aspects of physical reality and their metaphorical significance and aspects of Bahai history and its living reality in the present. In the second context, I see myself as working and living, having my life and being in a series of concentric circles, mostly in the outer concentric circle with a focal point at the Bahai World Centre with the holy dust of the Bab and Bahaullah, the epicentre of the Bahai order and its system, its physical reality. This centre does not dissolve and its energies flow out to the world, to my world.

What I emphasize in this discussion of certitude and these levels of consciousness applied before this new paradigm. But it is important to emphasize it, to restate it, here for readers within the context of developments in this new Bahai culture. A final aspect of the new perspectives and the new Bahai culture that I want to emphasize here is the modern crisis in the study of literature. It is a practice of reading that begins with the assumption that meaning is a textual construction and it is a construction in the hands and mind of the individual reading the text. For the last quarter century deconstruction as a literary theory has challenged the way many literary theorists and analysts think about texts. Perhaps even more useful than the noun “construction” is the verb “constructing” because deconstruction is a continuous process of interacting with texts. According to deconstruction, a text is not a window a reader can look through in order to see either the author’s intention or an essential truth, nor is the text a mirror that turns back a vivid image of the reader's experiences, emotions, and insights.

DECONSTRUCTION

Deconstruction eludes definition and detailed description. It is a practice of reading that aims to make meaning from a text by focusing on how the text works and is connected to other texts as well as the historical, cultural, social, and political contexts in which texts are written, read, published, reviewed, rewarded, and distributed. The individual reading is the one who makes meaning, but it is meaning within a intelligible pattern of beliefs established over timeby the reader. It is meaning in the context of language. Human reality, to the deconstructionists, is linguistic and infinitely complex. Speech, words, continually shape and reshape our vision of the world. If we do not give shape and meaning to the words they are, to that extent, meaningless. We not only must give shape to thought, we must act. This is the fundamental unity and coherence of philosophy and religion within this deconstruction---at least as I see it, as I interpret it. Deconstruction helps the individual discover the continuity of history and truth in language.(See: Beyond Deconstruction by Kenneth Kearans.

Deconstruction is, for me, part of the whole metaphorical nature of the Bahai Writings. The new Bahai paradigm is experienced, from my perspective, as a way of studying the Bahai writings and Bahai history. Each tutor, each Bahai and each person who examines Bahai texts will sift the material in his or her own way. For my money deconstruction offers heuristic insights and I, therefore, emphasize this method of reading and study within this new paradigm, a paradigm which allows for many types and styles of reading. Readers need to be reminded frequently in this book that my views are just that--my views. They are my approach to the study and interpretation of the Bahai writings as an activity within this paradigm and its implementation in Study Circles. Readers are left to work out their own approaches. We all have to do this as Bahais all our lives whether we are discussing Study Circles, interpretation of some aspect of the Cause, this new paradigm of culture and growth or one of an infinite number of other topics. Man is an animal at the apex of creation and he is suspended in webs of significance which he himself has spun. This Bahai paradigm provides a context for the spinning of these webs of significance. If the individual does not spin these webs, and their meaning and significance, knowledge and action will not get caught in their net.

In using deconstruction, the reader uses interpretive strategies that reveal how a text unravels many meanings. Deconstruction is a strategy for revealing the underlayers of meaning in a text, underlayers that may not have been considered or assumed by others from the obvious and the clearly intended meanings. Texts are never simply unitary in meaning; they include resources that run counter to their overt assertions or even their authors’ intentions. In other words, deconstruction helps the reader examine the givens in a text and create his own meaning system based on these givens. One of the givens in some schools of Western metaphysics has been that language can be put aside by reason to arrive at a pure, self-authenticating truth or method.

However deconstruction, as an interpretive strategy, assumes that language is unstable and ambiguous, can often be inherently ambiguous and contradictory; meaning therefore is only partly, and never fully, grasped. One must often defer meaning. There is often no one and only answer to the many questions that arise from a text. For me, this is all part and parcel of the opening out of the Bahai culture to a host of interpretations and ways of looking at both the Bahai writings, Bahai community life and the wider society. To the Bahai studying the writings, he or she assumes these writings matter. In the beginning was the word and, as the deconstructions would emphasize, the word is not on trial, everything is in the text itself.(Frank McConnell, "Will Deconstruction Be the Death of Literature?," Wilson Quarterly, Winter, 1990.

RE-CREATION AND SELF-RENEWAL

We moderns, post-moderns, transmoderns or whatever term one wants to use for us as Bahais are centred, so to speak, in this new paradigm; those doing this literary deconstruction, are rather like Michelangelo’s captives struggling for meaning out of their formlessness. We are each a “self-producing” system. We are involved in a system that is engaged in a constant recreation and redefinition of itself, of us as individuals, and of the community. This is done through the selective reorganization of the order and the disorder, the endless sensory and ideational diversity present in the surrounding worlds and within ourselves. This way of seeing life as a constant form of self-recreation and self-renewal as well as community recreation and renewal is all part of a narrative process. The construction of identity takes the form of a narrative. The narrative-self occupies a position in a vast web, a nexus, a host of points of intersection, a linkage of past, present and future. We are all intimately involved and preoccupied with what is real, with an image and print glut and especially an image glut.

This self aims at learning and the cultural attainments of the mind, but it must possess a sense of its own nothingness so that the ego does not dominate the social interaction in which the self is engaged. No self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich or poor, each of us is located at ‘nodal points’ of specific communication circuits however tiny these may be. Or better: one is always located at a post,a place in the landscape, through which various kinds of messages pass. The self in this sense, then, is a type of social nexus. The self exists only within webs of interlocution or interchange. We are not the centre of the universe; we revolve around a centre; we endow the world with its significance and provide meaning for our world. There is only one essential Centre and one Text and all the participants in this new paradigm revolve around this Centre and this Text.

This may sound to some readers as all too abstract and complex to take in. Such readers are partly right. The process is complex and in many ways very abstract. I encourage readers to persist through this written, this verbal, complexity that I am trying to describe. In true consultation diverse points of view can reverberate across the wide range of Bahá'í writings. Individuals dominating and a majority being passive and watchers of the spectacle of interaction is not true consultation; having tidy discussions with conclusions arrived at is not always a sign of success. This process is much like the Baha;i journey itself. it is not about arriving; it is about being committed to tread step by step on the never-ending journey towards more sympathy and understanding, wider relationships and definitions. To draw on and refer to Bahá'í standards will often mean bearing in mind the constant possibility of standards other than those restricted by the gravity of our own experience. Hang in there, then, as I try to explore the implications of this new paradigm.

In the Bahai teachings there is a convergence of spiritual, scientific and philosophical thought, indeed, a unified model of the universe in all it complexity and wonder, its mystery and awesomeness. The universe is infinite and spiritual knowledge is infinite. Our inner and outer struggles will never be over. This new Bahai culture of learning and growth invites both Bahais and interested seekers to take a spiritual journey that does not rely on gullibility but on one's deepst desire to know and understand oneself in relation to the Unknown. The Bahai paradigm asks readers to put the world's current paradigms on hold and to examine a renewed way of looking at things, a way that is philosophically logical, scientifically accurate and spiritually unifying. The Bahai model ties together and connects many of the floating abstractions into one logical and cohesive unity. This unity, and its notion of truth, results from how we use our language. To put this another way: Truth/truth verbalizes Reality/reality in this latest of the Abrahamic religions and its profoundly anti-clerical stance.

It is not my purpose in this book to go into any detail regarding Bahai theology or ontology, Bahai cosmology or cosmogony, Bahai philosophy or sociology, Bahai psychology or history, among other disciplines. These many subjects have begun to be explored in other books which the serious reader can access either on the internet or in a good Bahai bookshop. The new Bahai culture of learning and growth does imply what Bahai culture has always implied both explicitly and implicitly a deep reading program. The simple core of the Ruhi materials serves as a beginning but it is not the end. When one has finished the Ruhi sequence one has arrived at the end of the beginning so to speak.

ANTHONY LEE AND THE RUHI PROBLEM AS HE SEES IT

Such an understanding of the new Bahai culture will help to deal with some of the criticisms of the Ruhi, the institute, process as were outlined in Anthony Lee's essay "The Ruhi Problem"(See BLO) some six years ago in February 2005 at the end of the first decade of this new paradigm. I would encourage readers to go to this essay for it contains just about all of the criticisms I have come across in the first two decades of the implementation of this new Bahai culture: 1996 to 2016---the end of the current FYP. None of us should be afraid of criticism, for it can be life-giving, life-enhancing, indeed, crucial for the maintenance of any group. But, as I state elsewhere in this book, the problem of criticism is a separate issue that readers need to do a word check in order to read all the references I make to this subject in these more than 400 pages and 190,000 words.

THE COMPLEXITY OF THE NEW PARADIGM

In many ways what I am writing about here is, as I say, complex and it is a result of: (a) the complexity of the subject matter and (b) my decades of learning as a student from the multitude of my teachers. What I am writing about here is the result of my own learning and is, as the historian Peter Gay emphasizes about the choice of topic, "a deeply emotional affair." My style of writing is, as the historian Edward Gibbon once wrote, the image of my mind. The choice and command of my language is the fruit of my exercise of it over more than six decades and it is the fruit and function of both nature and nurture. I hope it is a bridge to a helpful substance of content and analysis for readers. What I write and how I write will not appeal to all readers. This literary exercise is the result of years of meditation and a sincere and deep interest in the subject matter. In the end, of course, one's work appeals to some and not to others. So, too, does deconstruction, a word, a topic, I mentioned above, appeal to some and not to others.

We in the developed nations live in a world of the virtual, in which media permeates everything and everyone. In this tenth and final stage of history which began in 1963, to use one of Shoghi Effendi's outlines of the past, the media has shifted from its former semi-saturation by/with what we could call “old media:” radio and newspapers, magazines and journals, as well as the first 3/4 of a century of cinema and, perhaps, two decades oftelevision. A shift has taken place in the last half century, since the election of the House of Justice in 1963, involving the development and convergence of new forms of media and distribution. This has produced profound social changes. The task of analyzing what these changes are and mean is even more important than it was twenty years ago in the years before this new Bahai paradigm emerged and before some of these new media emerged.

The task of theory now, at least as I see it, and one of the tasks I take on in this book, is to trace the changes in society in this tenth stage of history and especially since the emergence of this new paradigm in 1996. Most of those in the West, those who are immersed in these new media, are influenced by the culture, and mediated culture that is saturated with an often disempowering and ultimately unsatisfying consumerism. The saturation of images, a type of image-glut laid on top of issues of immense complexity, has produced the world in which this new paradigm operates, its mise en scene. All of the print and electronic media are, in some ways, a form of public pedagogy which are a crucial means for the organizing, shaping, and disseminating of information, ideas, and values. These media are components of broader cultural politics that have been co-opted by corporate power, shaped by neoliberal, market-driven ideology. This public pedagogy is seen as a powerful ensemble of ideological and institutional forces whose aim is to produce competitive, self-interested individuals vying for their own material and ideological gain. Media, then, bear influence on society not only by shaping ideas and perspectives, but also by doing so in the context of broader, increasingly concentrated corporate interests. Many argue, too, that media play a stronger role than either family or school in the shaping of individual vlaues in this 21st century. Whether this is true or not, there is little doubt that the new Bahai culture, the new Bahai paradigm, must contend with these powerful strongholds of public pedagogy and try to understand their insinuating as well as educative affects if the influence of what one might call the spirit of a true Bahai consciousness is to be developed. This issues here are of great complexity and my few comments here are only intended to skirt the edges. I leave it to readers to tease-out their own meanings and interpretations of the issues.

MATERIALISM

The emphasis on materialism, on consumption, connects directly to religious values. Lives spent valuing acquisition of material possessions tend to place less value on the intangible, the spiritual, and the self-sacrificing. Materialism becomes a distraction from a God-centred life. Excess materialism is a social contagion, draining global resources, straining lives, and debasing values in the dogged pursuit of more. This cancer makes the efforts of individuals to teach the Cause as difficult, if not more difficult, than ever. Receptivity has been great since Abdul-Baha told us it was great back in the years of the Great War nearly a century ago, but the manifestations of this receptivity are often subtle and require understanding on our parts if we are not to be disappointed by the meagre outward and quantitative results of our teaching efforts. This has been true all my Bahai life and it is true, a fortiori, in this new paradigm in all the places in the West where I have lived since World War 2. From a planetary perspective there has been an increase in the growth, the size of the Bahai community, but in most places in the West numbers continue to see only a slow, if steady, increase.

INDIVIDUALISM AND EGOISM: ASOCIAL TENDENCIES

The one-dimensional calculating ego-based idea of the individual which dominates as the a priori taken-for-granted basic assumption of individual human nature, makes psychology and the social sciences, as I see them, unable to solve most of today's pressing problems. To attack our civilization's problems with knowledge based on the predominant position of the individual as an asocial egoist, is totally insufficient. Practice can not any longer be based only on this particular voice or conception of human nature. We must therefore, I would conclude, try to understand the social individual on the basis of a broader perspective of assumed ideas other than the individual only being concerned with calculating and evaluating own individual advantages and disadvantages. An alternative a priori assumption about social and collective behavior and development is at the basis of this new paradigm; notions which have received little attention from psychology and the social sciences. There are deep urges and needs for solidarity, community, sharing, and reciprocal understanding. It is these fragile experiences that must be preserved and fostered if we want to keep alive the idea of moral and social development.

THE SACRED IN OUR TIME

How is the sacred modified in this new paradigm through its interaction with virtual, media culture? Subjectivity in the contemporary is clearly what Scott Bakutman (1993, p.5) calls a “terminal identity,” one formed in front of the computer, television and mobile screens, at the intersection of various information networks. Media “news” seems unable to relay “real” events without first mediating them through popular culture references from music, films or TV; indeed the lines between journalism, entertainment and advertising are blurry at best. This is the age of the spin-off, of product placement and infotainment. Symbols slide through different mediums, from the movie screen to the television to the computer to the mobile phone to the written page to the clothing with which we brand ourselves. The new Bahai paradigm is set in this context. Not every reader here will find my emphasis, my theoretical position, a helpful framework for analysis of this paradigm. For me, though, there is a cultural logic to my analysis with its emphasis on the global, the dispersed and the virtual in culture. To understand our society, our world is crucial to our understanding of the new Bahai paradigm. For billions of others in our planetary culture all these new media forms have no meaning for theirs is a world of poverty, third world status and simple survival. This reality must be kept before us as we explore the implications and the realities of the new Bahai paradigm.

The sacred in our time has come to consist of forms that are consumed by the mass, by millions in the world of popular culture in part for their spiritual content, for an experience of the transcendent ambivalently situated on the boundary of formal religious and spiritual traditions. The new forms of the sacred are everywhere once one begins to look for them; popular culture is rife with the detritus of millennia of religious traditions. Because of the suspension of the usual rules of the “real world” in their textual universes, the new forms of the sacred occur most of all in the literary and visual genres of science fiction, horror and fantasy--what might be termed the “fantastic postmodern sacred.” Although they are produced for the profane purposes of capitalism and entertainment, these texts are heavily packed with spiritual signifiers cobbled together from various religions and myths. All of these, I argue, refract religious symbols and ideas through a postmodernist or transmodern sensibility, with little regard for the demands of “real world” epistemology, real world systems of knowing.(See John C. McDowell,“Wars Not Make One Great”: Redeeming the Star Wars Mythos from Redemptive Violence Without Amusing Ourselves to Death," in The Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, Spring, 2010.)

When Bahais in the developed cultures experience various activities in their new culture of learning and growth, they are also experiencing so many media forms in much more extensive proportions. A study circle of two hours a week must compete in the consciousness of many, if not most Western, Bahais with dozens of hours of television and cinema, radio and music. As Firuz Kazemzadeh said back in the first plan of the House of Justice: "we are one per cent Bahais and 99 per cent our culture." The new Bahai culture, though, provides for the Bahai community a living and developing tradition. It is not some dead weight from the past, but something that informs and shapes thought and is, itself, evolving. Meaning emerges over time; the meaning of the Bahai texts also evolve within an infinite process.

EDWARD GIBBON

As a final opening note I would like to add here some words of Edward Gibbon which hopefully place this new Bahai culture in what is, at least for me, a helpful perspective. The words come from Gibbon's book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

"There are two very natural propensities which we may distinguish in the most virtuous and liberal dispositions, the love of pleasure and the love of action. If the former is refined by art and learning, improved by the charms of social intercourse, and corrected by a just regard to economy, to health, and to reputation, it is productive of the greatest part of the happiness of private life. The love of action is a principle of a much stronger and more doubtful nature. It often leads to anger, to ambition, and to revenge; but when it is guided by the sense of propriety and benevolence, it becomes the parent of every virtue, and, if those virtues are accompanied with equal abilities, a family, a state, or an empire may be indebted for their safety and prosperity to the undaunted courage of a single man. To the love of pleasure we may therefore ascribe most of the agreeable, to the love of action we may attribute most of the useful and respectable, qualifications. The character in which both the one and the other should be united and harmonised would seem to constitute the most perfect idea of human nature." This new Bahai paradigm provides, it seems to me, an excellent context for the manifestation of these two natural propensities. Perhaps, though, more than either of these propensities, is the soul's motion in relation to its Beloved unfolding in the process so much of the meaning of life as the lifespan develops from its early years through middle and old age---if one lasts that long.

AN OPENING NOTE: IT'S ABOUT TIME

This book of 420 pages and 190,000 words contains my personal reflections and understandings regarding the new culture of learning and of growth, the paradigmatic shift that the Baha’i community has been going through since the mid-1990s. Back in the mid-1990s the pattern most prevalent in the Bahai community, the pattern that had existed for many decades, for helping individual believers increase their understanding of the Cause they had joined consisted primarily of occasional courses and classes. Some were offered locally, some were part of national deepening programs and for the most part individuals were left to deepen or not to deepen their knowledge as the case may be. This is still the case; individuals are free to participate or not; there has never been in the Bahai Faith the kind of compulsion one often finds in other religious and quasi-religious movements.

The efforts to teach the Cause, to spread it to every corner of the Earth, have continued in this new paradigm as they had done since the formal inception of this new Faith in the 1860s. The focus, too, in the organizational structure of the Bahai community during the first six decades of the formal implementation of Abdul-Bahas Divine Plan, 1936 to 1996, was on the spread of the Cause, the building of an international Bahai community, of national and local spiritual assemblies as well as a broad infrastructure of committees and agencies at the international, national, regional and local levels. The result was an organizational form for the Bahai community, a form which entered a new, a Four Year Plan, in 1996 and which began to make some major adjustments to its outward and inward structure for the purposes of teaching and consolidation, ethos and functioning as well as effectiveness and efficiency.

The methods of teaching and consolidation as well as the organizational focus and form that had existed during the lives of virtually the entire Bahai community since the opening of Abdul-Baha's Plan in 1936/7 began to undergo a paradigmatic shift in the years 1996 to 2013. Those methods and forms that were seen as satisfactory as the Cause spread first from the Middle East in the 19th century and then to many countries outside the Middle East by and after the 1930s, were reviewed and revised, reoriented and reinvented in such a way that the overall patterns and programs, indeed, the ethos and outreach of the Bahai community could be said to have begun a paradigmatic shift. This subject can be studied in more detail, in a systematic way in a series of letters, papers, articles and books.

In this book I have been compiling and composing, writing and editing in the last four years I subject this paradigm to a personal examination and survey, a seeing it with my own eyes and not the eyes of my neighbour, an idiosyncratic focus that places the emphasis on what role I have and will play in the years ahead. This book is, then, a highly personal statement and readers need to see it as such. I engage in some of the core activities, but most of my teaching time is spent on opportunities which arise on the internet. They are “outside the box” activities and they are rooted in my individual initiative. If this book helps others to work out their own role in this new paradigm, both inside and outside the box, as it were, I will be more than pleased. As the House of Justice pointed out in its message of 28/12/'10, Bahais need to "discern with ease those areas of activity in which the individual can best exercise individual initiative and those which fall to the institutions alone." As the Supreme Body continues: "wealth of sentiment, abundance of good-will and effort are of little avail when their flow is not directed along proper channels."

It should be obvious to readers by now, at the early stage of this book, that much of what I write applies in the main to the Western world, to developed societies and not to those many parts of our planet that do not have, as yet, access to the enormous benefits of the world's scientific, technological and material developments. To chose but one example: of the 7 billion inhabitants of the planet less than two billion use the internet. Much of my work in the international Bahai community in the last 15 years has been on the internet and my guess is that, of the approximately seven million Bahais, less than two million are on the internet. Much of the quantitative success in teaching and in the implementation of much of the new paradigm applies more to village life in the third world. This is not to say that the urban centres of the West do not require the harmonious interaction of the three key participants--the individual, the institutions and the community---for they clearly do and have for decades.

SIXTY YEARS BEFORE THIS PARADIGM: 1936 TO 1996

Since the 1930s the Bahai Faith has taken-off, so to speak, across the globe from the first systematic plans and the inception of that Plan and its teaching programs from 1936 to 1996, a period of sixty years. The spread of this Cause during those sixty years was unprecedented. It came to cover the face of the Earth and it had done so, for the most part, during my lifetime. I do not mean by this, of course, that the Bahai Faith can now be found in every town, city, hamlet, village and rural locality. Far from it. This would occur, as the Bahai vision would have it, in the decades and indeed centuries to come with an inevitability that was part of this Faith's teleological, providential, religious, view of history. Still, the spread of this Cause, in some ways, has been a most extraordinary achievement in my lifetime: some four epochs. This book is not a historical documentary of those epochs, those sixty years but a sort of 'what's next?' story. The 'what's next' is the first 20 years of this paradigm and the years to come which will also be in the historical and contemporary context of this paradigm. More than half the clusters into which the Bahai community now divides the earth's landscape have no Bahais. The spread of this new world religion still has far to go and it will be done in the context of this new culture of learning and growth. The goal of the Plan from 2011 to 2016 is "to raise the total number of clusters in which a programme of growth is underway--at whatever level of intensity--to 5000." There will still be about 10,000 clusters out of the 16,000 total with no Bahais and/or little growth in 2016. There will still be much work to do at the end of the Plan the Bahai community is currently embarked upon: 2011-2016. Indeed, there will be much work to do in all the Plans that remain to 2044 when I am 100 years old, if I last that long, and the Bahai world, the Bahai Era, is at the opening of its third century.

In the several thousand clusters, though, "which have embarked on intensive programs of growth, or are at the threshold of doing so the Regional Bahá’í Councils have appointed an Area Teaching Committee, whose role is to coordinate and unify the collective teaching activities of the friends in the cluster, and to work closely with the institute coordinator and the Auxiliary Board member in planning the cycles of growth and the cluster reflection meetings". (letter from NSA of Australia to LSAs 29/7/2008).

There has unquestionably been a freshness and a radiance associated with this new Faith both within its community life and externally in its visibility across the planet in the decades since my family in Canada made its first contact, went to its first fireside in 1953--after the Cause had been in Canada for a little more than half a century. The indirect affects of this Cause are, from a Bahai perspective, immeasureable, incalculable. As the Bahai Faith has gone from strength to strength and as millions of its adherents found it was 'bliss to be alive' under a new dispensation so much has happened since the formal and systematic beginning of Abdul-Bahas Plan in the mid-1930s. Not everyone, of course. felt that bliss and the feeling of bliss did not prevail in the heart of each believer 24/7, as they say these days. Trials and tribulations generally tend to make the feeling of bliss a transitory entity. The individuals in the developing Bahai community were clearly part of the many are called and each one of its members might wonder if they were part of the 'few are chosen.' For this was not a community of the saved, the elect, the chosen, in the traditional exclusivist sense. An instrument of God's will and purpose with a new Book, the Bahai community had spread across the surface of the Earth and, in this new paradigm, the spread was continuing and would continue based on many more systematic Plans, all part and parcel of that vision of Abdul-Baha as outlined, among other places, in His Tablets of the Divine Plan written during the Great War and unveiled in New York in 1919.

EMPOWERMENT

Empowerment in this new Bahai culture is multilateral and multi-dimensional. Competence and meaning, self-determination and individual choice, impact and trust are all emphasized. This new paradigm aims to induce a strong commitment among the members of the community. This sense of commitment has several dimensions: affective, continuance and a normative aspect. Empowerment and organizational commitment are important and they are issues in all modern societies and organizations. Success in the global marketplace of culture and growth comes to organizations built on synergy, collaboration, flexibility and partnership. An organization that expects individual accountability in return provides a good deal of individual freedom to its members. Compulsion, coercion, demand, force, pressure, domination, control: these are not part of the Bahai paradigm; they are rarely conducive to empowerment. A kindly longue, understanding, empathy, a host of spiritual qualities and an awareness of the distance between our visions and the form they take, our aspirations and their expression are all part and parcel of any genuine sense of the many-faceted nature of this chameleon thing we call empowerment.

Despite its widely recognized role, there has been no consensus on the definition of empowerment. Scholars have considered it mainly in connection with organizational practices or managerial techniques; they have often neglected to investigate its underlying process. In addition, the word has been used with a variety of meanings such as delegation of power, autonomy, leadership skills, teambuilding experiences, intrinsic motivation or self-determination,effectance motivation or competency, sense of control, need for power, and self-efficacy. It is not my intention to address all these components of empowerment in the context of this new paradigm but, suffice it to say, they are all addressed in one way or another within this paradigm's framework.

Empowerment is the delegation of decision-making prerogatives to members of the community, along with the discretion to act on one's own. There is a dual emphasis in this paradigm on working in groups and on individual initiative. Empowerment is the process which enables people to gain power and influence not so much over others, over institutions or over society as over their own selves. Empowerment is many things. It blends and embodies a dozen different contexts: agreement, concession, acquiescence, freedom, liberty, indulgence. Readers need only look the word up in their thesaurus to get the immense range of its potential meanings. Probably the totality of the following or similar capabilities provide a helpful context for understanding empowerment:

(i) Having decision-making power of one's own
(ii) Having access to information and resources for taking decisions
(iii) Having a range of options from which one can make choices (not just yes/no,either/or)
(iv) Ability to exercise assertiveness in collective decision-making
(v) Having a positive and realistic attitude on one's ability to make change
(vi) Ability to learn skills for empowering one's personal or group power
(vii) Ability to change other's perceptions by democratic, consultative means, by means of the power of words
(viii)Involvment in a growth process and its changes, a process that is never ending and self-initiated
(ix) Having a self-image that is a mosaic of true and false, real and unreal
(x) Having an increase in intentionality, that is, the willingness and the desire to act. We want to act because we are anxious to experience the sense of increased mastery: this acting, this action, is the dramatization of our intentionality. The greatest drama in the world of existence is the drama of people in community.

The spiritual growth process is lived and dramatized by each individual in a way which is unique to him though the basic mechanism of progress and the rules which govern it are the same. The fact that this process is unique to each individual means that we each must come to know our own selves. As Socrates said 25 centuries ago, and as the Bahai writings emphasize time and again, "the unexamined life is not worth living." This is the base from which we each must act: a knowledge of our own selves. This is no cliche; it has many depths of meaning which when understood provide a wealth of understanding of: why we do what we do, what we should and should not do. The concept, the issues at stake here, are complex. The story is long, too long to go into in more detail here.

One psychological perspective on empowerment views it as a subjective phenomenon. Empowerment in this view is a motivational construct where power and control are seen as motivational states internal to individuals. As a psychological construct empowerment in this sense raises the convictions of community members about their own effectiveness. Some studies view empowerment as a psychological construct where the responsibility for motivation lies with the individual; others see the responsibility lying with the group, the leadership in the community. Again, this aspect of empowerment can provide much insight but the concept would require too many words to explore here in detail.

Another assumption about empowerment is that members who feel a sense of power are more likely to obtain what they desire and be of genuine value to a community. Community members who have this sense of power are more likely to achieve outcomes that are desired by the community they are part of. Members who lack the sense of power are more likely to feel critical of others, feel their activity is not effective and never realize their personally desired outcomes. Empowerment in the sense I am using it here is defined as a dynamic, continuous variable. There is no "final" state of empowerment. It is a continuum with group members feeling various degrees of intrinsic task motivation. And again, readers are encouraged to follow-up on this topic.

A community's shared beliefs, ideology, values, language, ritual and myth define its culture. The culture of any community is comprised of a set of shared beliefs and assumptions that are actualized through artifacts and rites, rituals and symbols, activities and attitudes. A group`s culture emphasizes its unique or distinctive character, a character that provides meaning to its members. Culture is deeply embedded, enduring, and often slow to change. The culture of any community exerts control over its member's behavior in a host of ways and that subject is deserving of a book unto itself.

THE NEW BAHA'I PARADIGM AND EMPOWERMENT

One could posit five elements of the Bahai culture of learning and growth that reflect a sense of empowerment in the individual members:

Systems thinking: Systems thinking challenges the illusion that the world is created of separate, unrelated forces. It is a conceptual framework that rests on the underlying assumption that actions and events are interconnected.

Personal mastery: Personal mastery is a philosophical element whereby individuals establish personal aspirations and live to serve these aspirations. There are no simple formulas here and often this sense of mastery is built-into conversations with others which are distinguished by depths of understanding. This sense of self-mastery takes place when individuals see themselves as active agents of their own learning.

Mental models: These are the deeply ingrained assumptions, generalization, and/or pictures and images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. This is the foundation on which a group's culture is built. It draws on history and sociology, psychology and the humanities. It is built on the cultural attainments of the mind.

Building shared vision: This represents creating a shared picture of the future that the group wishes to create. Creating a shared vision instills the genuine commitment of its members and this vision is a form of control that softens or negates the use of compliance mechanisms. This shared vision can be created without the individuals even meeting each other. Ties of friendship can result, as they now are doing by the millions and billions, as a result of cyberspace.

Team learning: Teams learn when the intelligence of the team exceeds the intelligences of the individuals making up the teams and the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise. These teams can work together or they can work apart. In our planetary culture, individuals can benefit from the experience of others even if they never meet in real time and space. In the international Bahai community, there is now one team working across the nations of the world.

THE PURPOSE OF LIFE: SUMMUM BONUM

One of the aspects of our secular culture and civilization in the West, and an aspect radically distinctive from all previous cultures is not science and technology, however wonderful that has been, but the lack of a summum bonnum, an end. We are the first civilization that does not know why we exist outside of the here and now, material advancement and learning, pleasure and some individualist end.(Peter Kreeft, C.S. Lewis for the Third Millennium: Six Essays on The Abolition of Man, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1994, p.46). The new Bahai culture seeks, in the decades ahead, to provide for millions a common summum bonum, a summum bonum in which religion and science can exist side by side.

Science in any of its forms and disciplines is a structure, a series of judgements, continuously revised, the systematic use of man's rational faculty. But technology and science do not fulfill any promise of transcendence. The kind of progress suggested by much in the world of science and technology, reason and the senses, is only progress in a certain materialistic sense. Often it amounts to regress. The last century offers some proof of this. Kreeft, in his analysis of The Abolition of Man, suggests that to understand progress, one needs first to understand the difference between kronos and kairos. Kronos is objective, measured time and kairos is “the time measured by human consciousness and purposive reaching out into a future that is not yet but is planned for. Only kairos knows anything of transcendent goals and values.(Kreeft,p.53)Only spirit can progress because only spirit lives in kairos. For only kairos touches eternity, knows eternity, aims at eternity. Progress means not merely change but change toward a goal,a goal which is far, far more than what is offered by the gloomy and sterile philosophy of materialism.

The changes along the way toward goals are, of course, relative and shifting, but the goals provided by this new Bahai culture involve the complex and enigmatic unity of the children of humankind. This will be achieved by a religion that is not competing with others but one with a unique contribution to play in the future of man. The goal, the goals, change along the way in the context of this paradigm and with the movement toward each step along the way. From a Bahai perspective the key word is progress and not just change; two other key words are spiritual-ethical and universal-global. This Bahai culture has as part of its continuing goal to free those with whom it comes in contact from what is so often a lingering and transient assumption that a new Revelation of God, a new major world religion is incompatible with the object of society's long search.

A NEW CIVILIZATION

We are living through the birth pangs of a new civilization whose institutions are not yet in place. Those involved in this new paradigm believe they are part of a process involved in the smooth and not-so-smooth spread of a transition to a new civilization, a new set of spiritual and political, economic and social institutions. This new Faith does not merely enunciate a set of universal principles or a particular philosophy, however potent and sound it may be, but it provides a new set of Laws and establishes definite institutions that are part of the Revelation Itself. No previous religion can offer a parallel, especially insofar as providing a more complete and more specific set of provisions, a more definite framework of guidance in the matter of succession. The problems arising in the matter of succession, the continuance of legitimate authority for interpretation of the Text, the Word, have been the source of so many, if not all, of the dissensions and controversies in the religions of history. The language is clear, unequivocal and emphatic regarding the provisions for the unity of this new Faith. It is in this that the unique feature of this Cause lies. This was true before this new paradigm and it is true, a fortiori, within the context of this paradigm. This aspect of the new paradigm must not be lost sight of in all the new discussion about a culture of learning and growth. For this new culture of learning and growth draws much of its sustenance from the guidance in this matter of succession, guidance which will protect the Cause from the heresies and calumnies which will assail it in the years of this new paradigm and which have already begun to be a source of some concern in the first decade and a half of the implementation of this new paradigm. I deal with problems which have arisen in this context to some extent in this book.

As it was written in the Psalms(cxviii, 22-23): "This is the Lord's doing and it is marvellous to our eyes," I often mused as the decades of my own life rolled by. The Bahais have been spiritually conquering the planet for decades and this process is continuing, although the world does not know it; indeed, the flame of this Cause is being ignited in the hearts of humankind: one by one and quietly. And this has happened, as I say above, is happening and will continue to happen in my lifetime and my children's lifetime---and, I have little doubt, their children's. This book contains some of that story but, mostly, the story I write of here is one that only came on board when I turned 50 in this new paradigm. I am now 65.

THE THEOLOGICAL AND THE PROPHETIC IN THIS PARADIGM

It is important, though, to understand some of the historical, indeed, the theological and prophetic context in which this paradigm was first introduced and is now developing. Both the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh undertook a courageous, for its time, demythologisation of apocalyptic scenarios anticipated in Biblical and Islamic scripture and tradition. It is the Bahá'í belief that the "catastrophe" or the apocalyptic upheaval of the last days has very largely, if not completely, been realised in the troubled yet brilliant 20th century. In the Bahá'í view, the coming of peace will be gradual and realized as a process in the 20th and 21st centuries. In the light of the Bahá'í teachings it is possible to argue convincingly that with the end of the cold war during the Plan preceding the Four Year Plan(1996-2000)in which this new paradigm began the "lesser peace" has all but been realised. One can also argue, perhaps not as convincingly, that this lesser peace is a process which began as far back as Woodrow Wilson's proposal for the League of Nations in his final address in support of the League of Nations in September 1919. The increasing trend towards disarmament, international co-operation, and globalisation, though, makes the argument that the "lesser peace" has all but been realised a strong one--at least in my mind.

Yet this secular, politically oriented "lesser peace" is not comparable to that peace which is spiritually rooted; the future truly millennial peace which is more than a virtual cessation of many intractable global conflicts. Realistic about the establishment of global, political peace, 'Abdu'l-Bahá predicted multi-national disarmament. The Montreal Star of 11 September 1912 reported that He had stated that nations would be forced into a peace process in the 20th century. Humanity would sicken over the cost of warmongering. Prior to the unfoldment of that secular disarmament which is the "lesser peace," varieties of "calamity" or "catastrophe" were and are clearly anticipated in Bábí-Bahá'í scripture. It is clear, however, that Bahá'í scripture does not expect or support a literal apocalyptic collapse of the cosmos or an absolute "end of the world." Scriptural writings that appear to suggest this possibility are not interpreted literally, at least not in a Bahai context. Of course, one will come across individual Bahais who argue with some fervour for a highly apocalyptic and cataclysmic future for not all Bahais, all the millions of Bahais, see everything in the same way, whether it be prophecies or paradigms.

This new paradigm comes, in one of the many time-frames in which one could set it, half a century after the following words of Shoghi Effendi in 1947: "The stage is set. The hour is propitious. The signal is sounded. Bahá'u'lláh's spiritual battalions are moving into position. The initial clash between the forces of darkness and the army of light is being registered by the denizens of the Abhá Kingdom in the "celestial worlds". The Author of the Plan that has set so titanic an enterprise in motion is Himself. He is mounted at the head of these battalions, and leads them on to capture the cities of mens' hearts."(Citadel of Faith, Wilmette: Bahá'í Publishing Trust, 1965, p.26) I have spent my entire adult life, and some of my adolescent life, as one of the members of that army of light. By 2007, the year this paradigm had been in place for more than a decade, I had been part of the discussion of its content for three years. I had also been in that army in varying capacities for more than fifty years. I had written an 800 page account of my experience, an account housed in the Bahai World Centre library. This account, this memoir, was not so much my story as it was an analysis, a personal commentary, on that half century.

This new Bahai culture is part and parcel of the new Order of Bahaullah. It is an Order, to use Biblical language, built upon the rock. The civilization in which this new Order is growing is, from a Bahai persepctive, built upon sand. It is an old tree whose roots are gradually decaying and the tempest of our times is tearing them up and overthrowing the solid trunk. The Bahai Order is a young sapling whose stems are awaying in the breeze while its roots remain firmly planted deep in the soil. The traditional and time-honoured strongholds of orthodoxy--political and religious---are, what you might call, dead-alive, while the Bahai Order is animated by a fresh vitality. The orthodoxies are now moribund and the Bahai Order is engaged in an act of creation due to the germ of creative power which it harbours. It is a chrysalis out of which will emerge in the fullness of time a new society, a globalized, planetized civilization. The Bahai community sees itself as the author, the genesis, of the spiritually-based society of the future. It is indeed, the emerging world religion and this new Bahai culture of learning and growth is a critical part of this emergence.

A major shift in Bahai community life, in the study of the writings and in the overall organization and patterns of interaction both within and without the Bahai community itself was announced in the years from 1996 to 2000, a Four Year Plan, the 6th initiated by the House of Justice since that institution was first elected in 1963. The aim of this new direction, this shift, this alteration, this rearragement of the deck-chairs which some critics thought all this coming and going, all these new programs and policies merely constituted, was in order to spur large numbers in the community into the field of action. Indeed, the purpose of this new paradigm was multifaceted and aimed at accomplishing many things, things this book deals with in circuitous ways.

I had been in the army, as I say above, for more than half a century. As Roger White, that unofficial poet-laureate of the 1980s and 1990s, had written: "I had tired of this old war" and "my barren fields were parched beneath the sun." I was a "mute witness to misfortune's scorching kiss." And yet: "each endearing strategem" of "my beloved foe" "enchanted me"--at least sometimes. I could wax eloquent or not-so-eloquent with that poet White and his words which gave expression to some of my Bahai experience over those decades before this new paradigm came into being and the new millennium opened in 2001--and as the first Plan of this new paradigm also closed. This new Plan which opened in 1996 with its goal of advancing the process of entry-by-troops placed an emphasis on developing the capacities of the believers.(Century of Light, p.109).

BAHA'I EDUCATION: 1964-1994

A universal system of Bahai education had begun to take place in the three decades 1964 to 1994 but it was significantly reinforced in the context of this new paradigm by the Ruhi Institute--a system which allowed for the almost infinite develoment by various user communities of a series of levels of study and branching sub-sets of topics and themes that served particular needs.(ibid, p.155). This new paradigm, focussing as it does on extending this universal system of Bahai education, was initiated for a number of purposes not the least of which was, as I say, in order to facilitate the process of entry-by-troops which has been emphasized in the Bahai community since the early 1990s. It was a process, this entry-by-troops, which the House emphasized would accelerate in the years and decades ahead. It was a process which the community could prepare for. It was a process at first envisaged, arguably, in a letter of the Guardian as far back as 1953. Forty years later, in 1993, the Bahai community was gearing-up and this new paradigm was part-and-parcel of a crucial preparatory period.

Inspite of, or perhaps because of, the extensive literature that became available on the process of entry-by-troops, or perhaps, again, because many aspects of this Faith are not simple, many of the Bahais anticipated a mass entry of new believers and when this mass entry did not occur discouragement and disappointment set in. The key word, as one of the more prominent Bahais emphasized at the outset of this new paradigm in 1996, was not entry or troops, but process. After more than two decades, then--1990 to 2013--of this new emphasis on troops, most of it in the context of this new paradigm, it is clear that the key word was and is "process." For entry in more than a trickle has not occurred except in a very few places.

This spurring into action was one of the main aims of this new Bahai culture. It is taking place in the last half(1992-2021) of the second epoch(1963-2021) of 'Abdul-Baha's divine plan, a plan which was unveiled, as I say above, in New York in June 1919 and was formally inaugurated in an organized form in North America in May 1937 after a year of preparatory work. This plan is now in its 8th decade of systematic implementation and it is destined to unfold over many epochs, generations and, indeed, I have little doubt, many paradigm shifts to come. The process is often slow, stony and tortuous and it often leaves the believers in a state of perplexity. This is in part due, as I mention above, to the need that individuals often have for immediate gratification and instant success which the social forces of their society, especially after world-war 2, have socialized them to expect at least in the more affluent parts of Western society.

As the Guardian wrote in God Passes By, though: "The process whereby the unsuspected benefits of this new Cause have been manifested to the eyes of men has been slow, painfully slow." "Crises," he went on to say, "at times threaten to arrest the unfoldment of the Cause and blast all the hopes which any former progress has engendered."(GPB, p.111) These crises and this slow unfoldment have often been the Cause of the disillusionment and discouragment of the believers. In some ways this is natural; it is to be expected. But this slowness set side-by-side a process like entry by troops provided a contrast, a paradoxical, an enigmatic, experience which was for thousands, if not millions of Bahais a test to their intellectual and spiritual selves. This test could be seen as part of the core experience of the many tests of many generations which could and would come to those who were the spiritual descendents of the Dawnbreakers, a complex role which would inevitably have its unpleasant aspects.

I make comparisons and contrasts in this book to previous paradigm shifts in the Bahai community. I also make suggestions regarding this new paradigm's future development that seem to me will take place in the years ahead and which have already begun to take place in recent years. Some of my suggestions will also appear in this book in the years ahead as this work develops: for this book is an evolving entity here at Bahai Library Online(BLO). A brief commentary on the history of the Bahai Faith, on the history of our time and my own life is also included. I attempt to integrate these several histories into one organic, if not systematic, whole in the context of this new paradigm. I do this exercise of integration as much, if not more, for myself, as I do for readers. Each Bahai is involved in integrating his life, the Cause and the wider society into some complex and, hopefully simple whole.

Hopefully, then, what I am doing in this book may be of use to readers as they travel on their own path and work out their unity in multiplicity, their unity in diversity. In the first five years of the existence of this book on the internet this book has begun to contribute, as I say above, to a dialogue on the issues regarding the many related processes involved in this ongoing paradigmatic shift. The book has also provided, at the same time, part of a relevant and much wider context in which some of the fundamental issues within this paradigm are being discussed--not only on the internet but also in the international Bahai community. This is, of course, due to the fact that the internet is an international community in its own right--whatever the many different attitudes to it may be.

As a matter of principle, individual understanding or interpretation of this paradigm is not and should not be suppressed. Sometimes, such is the view of a small group of Bahais, views are suppressed. It is difficult to experience the cut-and-thrust of any genuine community life without a feeling that one cannot say what one wants to say. The problem is a little like the problem associated with honesty and frank consultation. One can go through ones life and ones relationships saying everything one feels and thinks if one wants to create chaos wherever one goes. The issue is not so much honesy but knowing what to say and when to say it: tone, manner, mode, etiquette of expression, tact, how much to disclose, timing, measuring the reception of ones remarks, wisdom, knowledge, understanding. What each person says needs to be valued for whatever contribution it can make to the discourse of the Bahá’í community, but this process of verbal interchange is one of the most complex entities for human beings in community.

And so it is that frankness and civility, courtesy and kindness are not easily achieved when people consult. An individuals verbal output, through dogmatic insistence on one's opinion, should not be allowed to bring about disputes and arguments among the friends; personal opinion must always be distinguished from the explicit Text and its authoritative interpretation by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi and from the elucidations of the Universal House of Justice on “problems which have caused difference, questions that are obscure and matters that are not expressly recorded in the Book”. These are the words of a recent House of Justice letter and they act like a refrain through this book. This book is not part of the recent internet noise in relation to this paradigm or in relation to developments in the Cause outside the explicit paradigm that have stirred-up so much controversy in the last 15 years. I trust there will be no readers who come to see this work as part of that seemingly endless verbiage and conflict, dissention and distrust that have characterized a corner of the internet since the mid-1990s. Given the increasing complexity not only of the Bahai paradigm, but also the society in which it engages, it is likely that some will come to see my book as part of the critical thrust of lance and parry that has arisen in the last decade and a half. Often when a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest. On this basis the new Bahai paradigm is still of interest.

My aim has not been to pass verdicts and conclusions and, in the process, not to find a sense of closure, but to open up questions, examine a complex set of events from different angles and enlarge, what often seems to me anyway, the often narrow circle in which this paradigm is discussed. I try not to impoverish the facts of this paradigm by discounting or softening some of their complexity. There seems to be an emerging system of learning and growth across the international Bahai community, a system of great simplicity as well as a system with some complex features for the community to comprehend as this paradigm develops a life of its own in the 120,000 localities and 6000 clusters where Bahais presently live--as well as in the 10,000 clusters where at present there are no Bahais. For this culture is an expanding one, as I have emphasized above, as the Cause itself by its very nature has been expanding and will continue to expand in the decades and, indeed, centuries ahead.

I have detected the complexity to which I refer above in both the literature and in the discussions that have taken place in the first 15 years of the implementation of this paradigm. As a retired teacher who used booklets like those in the Ruhi program as part of what in post-secondary education in Australia was often called the core curriculum and extension resources; I am more than a little conscious of their apparent simplicity as well as some of the complex problems associated with their implementation by teachers, tutors, lecturers or whatever names one gives to those who help students learn through their use. This dichotomy of simplicity and complexity is not a new thing in the Bahai community. I would argue that the complexity-simplicity spectrum has been part and parcel of Bahai history since its beginning.

The Universal House of Justice mentions this complexity in one of its most recent message, a message of 13,000 words, at Ridvan 2010. They refer to the "growing complexity" of the Cause and the need to manage it with "greater dexterity." I should emphasize, en passant, that this book attempts to integrate many views contained in the most recent messages from Bahai institutions as well as letters and internet posts from sigificant individuals in the Cause as well as many others, especially those who now post on the internet and who contribute effectively to an ongoing and virtually continuous dialogue in that world of cyberspace. In the process of this literary integration over 420 pages, some readers may find I have ered on the side of complexity when they were searching for simplicity. What I am trying to do in this book is very much along the line of Mr. Lample's comment in June 2010 in relation to the Ridvan 2010 message. I am trying to get my bearing and answer two fundamental questions: “Where are we going next?” and “Where have we been?” That 8,000 word 2010 Ridvan message has gone a long way to help me answer these two questions.

ONE PERSON'S VIEWS ON THE RUHI BOOKS, THE INSTITUTE PROCESS:

As I indicate in this book, I am not providing a systematic study of this new Bahai culture. I would like, though, in the following paragraphs to outline the experience of one person who has been associated with the Ruhi Books since their inception and with deepenings for a decade or so before the implementation of the new Bahai culture of learning. I do this because what this person has written is, from my point of view, an excellent overview of the many pluses and minuses of this new learning process that the Bahai community has embarked upon in the last decade and a half and which, as I see it anyway, is merely the beginning of an elaborately detailed learning mechanism and process that will evolve in the Bahai community in the decades ahead.

This person begins by saying that back in the early 1990s early drafts of Ruhi Book One began to appear in North America. Early drafts of other Ruhi books also appeared before the implementation of the entire sequence in country after country in the late 1990s and in the first decade of this third millennium. As I write there is a sequence of seven Ruhi Books with more on the curriculum-design books to come. Many people enjoy the exercises and activities, the memorizing, the quizes and the word games associated with some of the Ruhi content. The problems associated with deepenings in the decades before the implementation of the Ruhi program in the late 1990s and the first decade of the new millennium were eliminated by this new curriculum.

This same person continues: "many study classes or deepenings from the 1930s to the 1990s were both good and bad as Abdul-Bahas Plan was put into place. There was a wide variety in the quality of study classes and deepening meetings in the Bahai communities in which I lived. I'm sure this was a common experience for most Bahais who have been in the community for decades. The Ruhi method has been a very useful addition to what was taking place in, say, the years 1937 to 1997, the first 60 years of the systematic implementation of Abdul-Bahas Plan. The Ruhi books have demanded that Bahais continue to focus on the actual Writings as previous programs of study always did. It uses some innovative exercises and introduces a strong element of systematization and commonality across the planet."

This person goes on: "Anyone who has witnessed first-hand the mass teaching and mass enrollment in parts of the world also knows the difficulties associated with the consolidation and deepening that should have followed, but did not. Such consolidation was plainly inadequate in most places. There are stories where tens, hundreds and sometimes thousands of people have declared their belief and then received nothing from the Bahai community as follow-up. The institute process is a counter to these sad realities of previous decades."

Here is a short list of the things this person has written about why they like the Ruhi sequence of books:

1. There are no lectures from an authority figure. Instead a facilitator keeps the process going.
2. The facilitator emphasizes that there are no right answers, and encourages participants to have fun and be creative.
3. The Ruhi course often has some very creative and humorous people involved, so there is often also plenty of laughter and imaginative thinking.
4. People enjoy some of the "games" played with the Holy Word where participants try to think of concrete examples of concepts and words in the passages they are studying. In the process of checking definitions, and doing interesting things with the exercises there is much learning going on. For example, people often share their visual imagery and this helps people memorize the passages from the scripture.
5. Sometimes people poke fun at the questions and exercises and have a good time with them. Everyone in the group understands that the Ruhi books and the exercises are just tools to give people a fun way to embrace the Creative Word.
6. People can look things up. The citations and the commentary gloss in Ruhi seems inadequate to some extent, but people meet in a Bahai context and, if there is a good library, the members of the study circle can frequently look up things to see the context, or trace the notes back to original sources.
7. There are service activities. The service is often fun. Members of study circles can initiate devotional meetings, and experiment with devotional meetings. Participants can try visual effects, play with the atmosphere, try new things with music and lighting, vary the seating arrangement, the types of devotional readings, and so forth.
8. The people in the Ruhi study circle usually like each other and often get together outside of the Ruhi course.
9. The people in the Ruhi study circle often spend more time on preparing the devotions and the devotional service than they spend on the Ruhi exercises and books. Probably for every 40 minutes spent on Ruhi study circles, participants often spend over an hour on their devotional meetings service.
10. The people in the Ruhi study circle spend more time together as friends socializing and supporting each other than they spend on either the Ruhi books or the service work. In a typical month they might have two hours of time with the Ruhi book, nearly four hours preparing and holding a devotional meeting, and five or six hours eating meals together at each other's homes for get-togethers and parties, not firesides or deepenings. The act of just sitting together and talking about life and politics, society and television, what they are reading and what is going on in the wide-wide world helps to foster relationships without which teaching in groups, accompanying each other, does not take place fruitfully.

On balance, this person writes, the Ruhi books and their learning packages are a force for good in the Bahai community. On the other hand, this same person writes that the Ruhi sequence of learning materials is not the greatest thing they have ever experienced since the invention of the car, the TV or cinema. If Bahai study classes were nearly uniformly awful before Ruhi, then Ruhi probably has raised the level of Bahai study. Prior to the Ruhi Books community study groups and classes were, of course, not uniformly awful. People's experience was that study courses, retreats, and schools were a mixed bag, with some good and some not-so-good, and even a single class could have a mix. Ruhi reminds this person, he continues, of an antidepressant medication. It seems to smooth out the extremes and prevent a class from getting really awful or really great.

Until the late 1990s, this writer goes on, Ruhi and institute activities were but one item on a menu of courses, and Bahai communities were encouraged to develop their own plans and programs. Ruhi had a fairly positive image in those earliest decades, say, 1970 to 1995. Gradually, in the first 15 years of the new Bahai culture, 1996-2011, national spiritual assemblies everywhere have decided, under the direction and encouragement from the ITC and the House of Justice, to implement the Ruhi book sequence as the core of all study circles. Everyone who wants can and should do Ruhi as the core of the institute process. It is, of course, left to the individual to opt into these study circles or not. There is no compulsion. The formal development by institutions of the Cause of other courses has been abandoned. Everyone who wants to do a series of courses trys Ruhi books for a year or two or more. If they want they can go back to developing their own courses, perhaps drawing on their common experience in Ruhi courses. But as Ruhi courses have become the dominant theme and core of the institute process everywhere other courses have been abandoned or so it seems from all the information I have at hand. This, of course, is impossible to judge in a world-wide community of some 120,000 localities in which diversity has always been encouraged. Bahai literature is now so extensive and individual communities are free to have deepenings and study programs on virtually any topic they like. Inevitably, then, in the wide-wide Bahai world other programs will be found in the interstices of Bahai community life across the planet.

As this same person continues in their commentary on the implementation of the Ruhi books: "Ruhi isn't that great. We can certainly do better. It should remain an option, and it should be encouraged in some circumstances. It's not the best thing going. In fact, I wouldn't dream of insulting my colleagues and neighbors by inviting them to a Ruhi study circle. To do so would be extremely unwise, and it would show a lack of wisdom, a lack of tact, and a lack of empathy on my part. The Ruhi exercises and the formats of the books are different from other study materials. Visiting people, saying prayers with people, and performing acts of service, may seem strange to some people. They are all things, though, that I can do. They can be done tactfully, and with wisdom, and people can enjoy those things."

"I'm also one who thinks the art projects which are part of the Ruhi activities are excellent especially for some participants. I take a social-worker and do-it-yourself approach to art and music. I'm influenced by the punk rock and the counter culture movement. I'm glad that Ruhi attempts to let people experiment with arts. I recognize,though, that some people feel that such activity is not really art, or they just hate doing the craft activities."

Here are the things that concern this same person about the Ruhi-centred study circles:

1. Ruhi's emphasis on the actual Holy Word is a strength, but the gloss written by the authors of the compilations of quotations is sometimes misleading. The quotations that are chosen are given without context, and quotations from non-scriptural sources are mixed in with scripture. The very process of the memorization and the exercises encourages a literal understanding of the quotations that are used.
2. The Ruhi course emphasis on service seems, in practice, to be mainly about service to the Bahai community. I'm a social worker, and I think Bahais have a duty through their institutions and especially through the "Dawning Place of the Mention of God" to do service for the entire, the wider, community. Bahais should also do much more than children's classes. It seems the Ruhi courses are asking Bahais everywhere to become very good at doing moral education and children's classes in order to teach the Bahai Faith and its message to the children in their communities. The strategy is perhaps to become good at two things, and then after the Bahai community has mastered the art of doing excellent moral education and children's classes it can move on to other avenues of service. This is far too limited for the Bahai community's service to humanity. I think that sometimes the emphasis on doing service for Bahais goes too far. Let our deeds rather than our words speak for us, and let our deeds be bold. We should be a balm to humanity, and admonishers to the wealthy and to tyrants.
3. The Ruhi books are not scripture. There is nothing in the Holy Writings about study circles, core activities, the Ruhi sequence of courses, and so forth. These things are tools. But, I'm afraid that instead of seeing Ruhi courses as special tools, many Bahais are incorporating Ruhi courses into the core of their religious experience. As such, I'm afraid Ruhi courses, including the limitations of the Ruhi books, are becoming an accretion, a man-made addition to the Revelation, a ritual, an unauthorized source of dogma, and a method of unifying Bahai thinking in a way that defeats the more essential teaching of unity in diversity.
4. The more I study the Ruhi material and do its exercises, the more tiresome and tedious they become. Some of the questions and answers we often give are inane. In some cases it seems the Ruhi exercises and questions are attempting to push us toward a literalist and very conservative approach to religion. I'd even say the Ruhi books betray a hint of the spirit of fundamentalism. So long as Ruhi is just one way of studying among many ways of studying, that is fine for me. But by making Ruhi books so strongly emphasized, I think we are pushing a particular aspect of our faith, a particular agenda, and it's not the agenda of Bahaullah, of 'Abdu'l-Bahá or Shoghi Effendi. So I'm worried.
5. The books seem very clearly aimed at people from cultures where the education level is very low. The courses seem well-designed for children, or persons who never got past the ninth year of schooling, or for people of sub-average intelligence. If you happen to be intelligent or well-educated, it's difficult to take the books seriously.
6. I've been in many classes where there is an obvious rush to get through the Ruhi courses. Instead of thinking deeply about the teachings and exploring their meaning I feel that I am rushing through the books. This rush to do what is on the page, and the corresponding insistence that we stick to only what is there on the Ruhi pages, is upsetting to me. It doesn't meet my social or spiritual needs. I think facilitators need to let people take Ruhi at their own pace and have fun with it. Study circles should not be like assembly meetings or business meetings.
7. The service component of Ruhi has never been emphasized in any course I've taken since a single good one that I did in the late 1990s. All the courses I've taken since 158 B.E.(2001) have either done nothing or very little with service programs and exercises. When we do just a little of the service component, it's a matter of personal experience rather than part of the class. That is still far better than the classes where the service is just an afterthought or ignored completely.
8. The choices of passages for study are usually pretty good. But the choices are not perfect. I think it would be easy to produce books with better choices of quotations from scriptures in order to achieve the lesson objectives. I also think the citation system in the Ruhi books is inadequate, as if the people putting the books together were not especially familiar with the Writings. The books should at least be revised with decent scholarship getting the citations right, and citing original sources where possible.
9. I am appalled that merit and honor seems to apply to persons and communities who complete Ruhi courses. Those who have not completed the Ruhi books are often seen as less than those who have. If a national spiritual assembly will only use its resources to render assistance to communities where there is enthusiasm for Ruhi, that is wrong; for example, if advertising and special support only comes to places where everyone is doing Ruhi, then only places where everyone is doing Ruhi will get the benefits of advertising and special support. We will also be limiting our potential if only people who have done particular Ruhi courses can be allowed to teach children's classes. The number of Ruhi courses a person does should carry no more weight than the number of years of schooling a person has experienced. That is to say, it should have almost no importance.
10. I am aware that members of the Universal House of Justice, including Paul Lample and Peter Khan, for example, have said that the regular firesides and deepenings and study classes must continue, and should not be abandoned for Ruhi. Rather, Ruhi should supplement, and be an addition to the community on top of the previous teaching efforts. The question that I hear is, "how many people joined the Faith because of your old methods?" and the answer is usually "not many" and the conclusion is, "then try this new thing, this Ruhi-institute process and see if you do better than you have been doing with the old methods, because in some places loads of people are embracing the Faith and staying active in it because of Ruhi." I agree that the old method and old culture in the Bahai communities where I lived weren't bringing in new believers and sustaining them. I agree that we need changes and new things and new approaches to improve the quality and capacity of our communities and our individuals. I see that Ruhi is doing some of this needed transformation. But, I also think Ruhi has replaced what we were doing well.

Finally, this person writes: "I came into the Faith without the Ruhi courses. I have become less active in Bahai studies in my local community because I am unenthusiastic about Ruhi. I am less active in my teaching because I'm embarrassed by Ruhi courses and would be ashamed to bring almost anyone I know to a Ruhi study circle as they have been recently taught. In fact, all this emphasis on Ruhi courses is making me feel alienated from the wider Bahai community at least the administrative aspects of it. I agree it's nice to check with Bahai friends around the world and find we've studied the same Ruhi materials, but I'd rather we were checking with each other about the same Hidden Words or the same sections of the Kitab-i-Iqan and so forth. I'd rather that we were comparing notes about things that we really found inspiring and challenging, instead of laughing about how silly the Ruhi books are, whether we read them in English, Spanish, or Mandarin, and how strange it is that we're being pushed to do these, and how out-of-touch people must be in Haifa to think Ruhi is the greatest thing to come along since the passing of 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

Such are some of the views of one person. As the years go on there will undoubtedly be a much more extensive analysis of the entire institute system as there has been of the elected and appointed sides of Bahai administration as it has developed in the last century and more. The above comments of one individual do not represent the generality of the Bahai community throughout the world. It would be impossible for one person's experience to be representative of that of the millions of adherents of this new world Faith. I have included the above comments because they are representative of a range of views after 15 years of Ruhi, of institute, implementation.

These comments have some parallels to my experience with books of a very similar educational and curricular design in my work in technical and further education, post-secondary education, here in Australia. Many of my students back in the 1990s in a college in Western Australia said similar things about instructional booklets I used in my classrooms in similar, indeed, in the same ways to the Ruhi books. The story of these resource materials has just begun.

THE HOUSE OF JUSTICE RIDVAN 2010

I would like to conclude this section with three quotations from the House of Justice Ridvan 2010 on the institute process and the role of cluster activity, the wider framework within which the Ruhi materials are implemented. These quotations illustrate the increasing definition of both the institute process and the cluster in the broad map of the Bahai community structure and functioning. The community building process which the House of Justice referred to as "just beginning" back at the outset of this new paradigm is, indeed, being increasingly elaborated upon within the organizational structure of elected and appointed institutions. All of these quotations come from the Ridvan 2010 message nearly a year ago now.

"The believers and the institutions that serve them will have to strengthen the institute process in the cluster, increasing significantly within its borders the number of those capable of acting as tutors of study circles; for it should be recognized that the opportunity now open to the friends to foster a vibrant community life in neighbourhoods and villages, characterized by such a keen sense of purpose, was only made possible by crucial developments that occurred over the past decade and a half in that aspect of Bahá’í culture which pertains to deepening." And secondly:

"In every cluster, once a consistent pattern of action is in place, attention needs to be given to extending it more broadly through a network of co-workers and acquaintances, while energies are, at the same time, focused on smaller pockets of the population, each of which should become a centre of intense activity. In an urban cluster, such a centre of activity might best be defined by the boundaries of a neighbourhood; in a cluster that is primarily rural in character, a small village would offer a suitable social space for this purpose. Those who serve in these settings, both local inhabitants and visiting teachers, would rightly view their work in terms of community building."

"To assign to their teaching efforts such labels as "door-to-door", even though the first contact may involve calling upon the residents of a home without prior notice, would not do justice to a process that seeks to raise capacity within a population to take charge of its own spiritual, social and intellectual development. The activities that drive this process, and in which newly found friends are invited to engage—meetings that strengthen the devotional character of the community; classes that nurture the tender hearts and minds of children; groups that channel the surging energies of junior youth; circles of study, open to all, that enable people of varied backgrounds to advance on equal footing and explore the application of the teachings to their individual and collective lives—may well need to be maintained with assistance from outside the local population for a time. It is to be expected, however, that the multiplication of these core activities would soon be sustained by human resources indigenous to the neighbourhood or village itself—by men and women eager to improve material and spiritual conditions in their surroundings. A rhythm of community life should gradually emerge, then, commensurate with the capacity of an expanding nucleus of individuals committed to Bahá’u’lláh's vision of a new World Order."

And thirdly:

"As learning has come to distinguish the community's mode of operation, certain aspects of decision making related to expansion and consolidation have been assigned to the body of the believers, enabling planning and implementation to become more responsive to circumstances on the ground. Specifically, a space has been created, in the agency of the reflection meeting, for those engaged in activities at the cluster level to assemble from time to time in order to reach consensus on the current status of their situation, in light of experience and guidance from the institutions, and to determine their immediate steps forward. A similar space is opened by the institute, which makes provision for those serving as tutors, children's class teachers, and animators of junior youth groups in a cluster to meet severally and consult on their experience. Intimately connected to this grassroots consultative process are the agencies of the training institute and the Area Teaching Committee, together with the Auxiliary Board members, whose joint interactions provide another space in which decisions pertaining to growth are taken, in this case with a higher degree of formality. The workings of this cluster-level system, born of exigencies, point to an important characteristic of Bahá’í administration: Even as a living organism, it has coded within it the capacity to accommodate higher and higher degrees of complexity, in terms of structures and processes, relationships and activities, as it evolves under the guidance of the Universal House of Justice.

SOME QU0TATIONS FROM RUHI BOOK 6

Here are some excellent quotations from Ruhi Book 6 on: Teaching the Cause

The Ruhi Books are full to the brim with relevant quotations and no book on this new Bahai culture would be complete without acknowledging these quotations. Here are some from Book 6 which are especially germaine to the new Bahai paradigm:

"The proclamation of the Faith, following established plans and aiming to use on an increasing scale the facilities of mass communication must be vigorously pursued. It should be remembered that the purpose of proclamation is to make known to all mankind the fact and general aim of the new Revelation, while teaching program should be planned to confirm individuals from every stratum of society." (From the 1974 Naw-Ruz message of the Universal House of Justice, published in Teaching the Bahá'í Faith: Compilations and a Statement Prepared by the Research Department of the Universal House of Justice, no. 312, p. 160)

"Having on his own initiative, and undaunted by any hindrances with which either friend or foe may, unwittingly or deliberately, obstruct his path, resolved to arise and respond to the call of teaching, let him carefully consider every avenue of approach which he might utilize in his personal attempts to capture the attention, maintain the interest, and deepen the faith, of those whom he seeks to bring into the fold of his Faith. Let him survey the possibilities which the particular circumstances in which he lives offer him, evaluate their advantages, and proceed intelligently and systematically to utilize them for the achievement of the object he has in mind."(Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, p. 51)

"Let him also attempt to devise such methods as association with clubs, exhibitions, and societies, lectures on subjects akin to the teachings and ideals of his Cause such as temperance, morality, social welfare, religious and racial tolerance, economic cooperation, Islam, and comparative religion, or participation in social, cultural, humanitarian, charitable, and educational organizations and enterprises which, while safeguarding the integrity of his Faith, will open up to him a multitude of ways and means whereby he can enlist successively the sympathy, the support, and ultimately the allegiance of those with whom he comes in contact."(Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, p. 51)

"Let him, while such contacts are being made, bear in mind the claims which his Faith is constantly making upon him to preserve its dignity, and station, to safeguard the integrity of its laws and principles, to demonstrate its comprehensiveness and universality, and to defend fearlessly its manifold and vital interests. Let him consider the degree of his hearer's receptivity, and decide for himself the suitability of either the direct or indirect method of teaching, whereby he can impress upon the seeker the vital importance of the Divine Message, and persuade him to throw in his lot with those who have already embraced it."(Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, pp. 51-52)

"Let him remember the example set by ‘Abdu'l-Bahá, and His constant admonition to shower such kindness upon the seeker, and exemplify to such a degree the spirit of the teachings he hopes to instill into him, that the recipient will be spontaneously impelled to identify himself with the Cause embodying such teachings. Let him refrain, at the outset, from insisting on such laws and observances as might impose too severe a strain on the seeker's newly awakened faith, and endeavor to nurse him, patiently, tactfully, and yet determinedly, into full maturity, and aid him to proclaim his unqualified acceptance of whatever has been ordained by Bahá'u'lláh."(Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, p. 52)

"Let him, as soon as that stage has been attained, introduce him to the body of his fellow-believers, and seek, through constant fellowship and active participation in the local activities of his community, to enable him to contribute his share to the enrichment of its life, the furtherance of its tasks, the consolidations of its interests, and the coordination of its activities with those of its sister communities."(Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, p. 52)

"Let him not be content until he has infused into his spiritual child so deep a longing as to impel him to arise independently, in his turn, and devote his energies to the quickening of other souls, and the upholding of the laws and principles laid down by his newly adopted Faith."(Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, p. 52)

TO CONTINUE ON OTHER THEMES:

I should mention here, thanks to the feedback of one of my readers, that I use many terms and sets of words for the elected institution at the apex of Bahai administration, a crucial institution that represents the full institutionalized charismatic Force which entered history over a century ago, the trustee of all which that Force represents and which, after its physical dissolution in 1892, continued to "energize the whole world to a degree unapproached at any stage in the course of its existence on this planet."(GPB, p.244). I use, as the case may be and as seems appropriate for the context the following terms: the Seat, the House, the House of Justice, the Supreme Instititution, the Supreme Body, the apex of Bahai administration, that institutionalized and charismatic Force, and, in some cases and especially in footnotes, the UHJ. I trust that some readers do not interpret my flexible and varied use of these terms for the Supreme Body as being disrespectful or discourteous, do not see my language as inappropriate in whatever context they come across my varied terms. I want to thank readers, at this point, for their continuing input into this evolving document and I look forward to the contributions both critical and in praise of what they find here at BLO. Some of this input is direct and some of it is by by use of quotations from the writings of others. I like to think of this book as a collected work in more ways than one.

In the minds, in the eyes, of many Bahais who have been attempting to get a handle on the many processes and activities involved in this new Bahai culture, all is not a simple exercise in understanding. Much of life and much of this paradigm presents to the student who would go about setting out its microscopic and macroscopic content an awkward and tangled reality. Penetrating below the surface of the paradigm's many dimensions is the result, for me, of a wondrous and distant gaze as well as a minute scrutiny. The power of this paradigm, to some extent, eludes the net of language, my language, as much as I would try to capture it in my mental and verbal net. This is partly because the implementation of this new culture of learning and growth is across the entire planet and partly because the experience of each cluster, each region and each national community is so very diverse. At this stage in the evolution of this new paradigm it is, indeed, impossible for me to do justice to the vast tapestry of the implementation of this new Bahai culture and the weaving of its innumerable strands of warp and weft. The implementation of the essential features of this paradigm, the evolving nature of its structures and functions and the successes and failures from region to region, cluster to cluster and country to country are simply beyond the scope of this book. This book is a general and somewhat idiosyncratic statement, a view of the process and content of this new Bahai culture from down at the bottom of the world in Tasmania where I live and have my Bahai being. And the aim of this book is, as I have said, highly personal and idiosyncratic. I want to answer the question: where do I fit in? I leave it to readers here to work out this answer for themselves.

Although I have found the writing of this book more tedious and toilsome than I had anticipated, I have also found, somewhat paradoxically, that there exists a fascinating immensity in the subject matter. The result is for me a literary performance that I enact before readers with the deepest observations and the most lively analysis and images that I am able to convey. In the process I hope to both clarify and enlighten on the one hand, for both me and readers; and set this new paradigm in a wider perspective on the other. It is good to aim high and I achieve this aim only in part. And, it must be stated often that this book is just one man's view; it possesses no authority and does not seek to impose any particular view of this paradigm on anyone. This book is, as I have already stated and as I will state again, merely a pot-pourri of thoughts and I hope readers will enjoy their time swimming about in the pot and tasting some of the flavoured soup which it is my hope is contained therein.

This dialogue, this discussion of the new Bahai culture, beginning as it did in the last years of the twentieth century really, got going at least for me with Moojan Momen's essay "A Change of Culture"(September 2004) when this paradigm was in its 8th year of execution. There was at that time, by 2004, in those earliest years of the first decade of the implementation of this new paradigm in the Bahai community, little written analysis by major writers in the Bahai community and little discussion on the internet, although the major institutions of the Cause and many NSAs had produced a wealth of literature to launch the framework for this new Bahai culture.

In the next eight years, from 2004 to 2012, an immense dialogue took place both on and off the internet about the nature and purpose, the details and structure of this new paradigm. This book is, among other things, the story of some of this dialogue, a summary of some of its essential features and the elaboration of its details by the Universal House of Justice and the International Teaching Centre(ITC) on the one hand, by many of the NSAs and individuals among the appointed and elected sides of the Cause on the other--as well as an increasing host of individuals. But this book does not presume to be an organized outline, a systematic analysis, as I say above, of this new paradigm. For this, readers need to seek other sources and there are many. Indeed, serious students of this new paradigm will not find a shortage in available literature on the subject. By April 2011, the month of the opening of the fourth Plan of this new paradigm, some 15 years into this new Bahai culture, a wealth of messages and letters, internet sites and internet posts, formal and informal analyses as well as dialogue in clusters and localities around the world had resulted in a plethora of written material available for anyone wanting to get a handle on this new paradigm.

In 2013, the year of the celebration of the first half-century of the House of Justice at the apex of Bahai administration, this new paradigm will have been in place for 17 years, nearly two decades. As far back as Ridvan 1988, the House of Justice had already referred to "a new paradigm of opportunity for further growth and consolidation" of the world-wide Bahai community. By 2013, then, after a quarter of a century with the word paradigm in the air, so to speak, there will be even much more written about this paradigm's development and much more will have taken place in the field of action. I hope to incorporate these developments into this book as both the paradigm and the book evolve in the years ahead in this space at Bahai Library Online which allows for ongoing additions, subtractions and alterations, in a word, editing. The literature on the subject of this new Bahai culture, as I say, is now burgeoning making the interpretation of the nature and purpose, the functioning and the myriad-sided structure of its features capable of many meanings to many people. We each come to see it through the lens of our own minds and hearts. This is only natural. This book is the view through one man's lens and the story of how he sees not only the participation of others, but his own participation in this new Bahai culture. Readers of this book, in the end, must work out the story of their own participation. Hopefully this book will help them in their decision-making process.

CRITICISM OF THE CAUSE IN GENERAL AND OF THIS PARADIGM IN PARTICULAR

After several years of what became a heated discussion of this new culture of learning and growth the temperature seems to be cooling down to more moderate levels, although not everywhere either on the planet or on the internet which has become a sort of cyberplanet. In a community of some six million souls one can be sure that there is lots of both criticism and praise. The Central Figures of this Faith encouraged the use of the mind, the rational faculty, and each Bahai must use their mind to see where they fit in, where they can make their particular contribution to the many aspects of the workings of this new Bahai culture. There is, of course, criticism and praise of this paradigm outside the internet. Each cluster where Bahais reside, for Bahais only reside in some 6000 of the 16000 clusters around the world, each Bahai locality--and there are some 120,000 localities--has, as I say, its unloving critics and its critical lovers.

Those who are actively engaged in cluster and community activity to some degree are always only a portion, for there are nearly always(if not always) those who could not possibly be defined as participants using virtually any of the possible criteria of community engagement. But this has always been the case; the notion of everyone being active at the same level of intensity and engagement, involvement and participation, is not and has never been achieved. It is not only not realistic it is not the way groups work in either the Bahai Faith or in any other organization. Like so many things in life individuals and groups achieve only so many of their aims and goals, only so much of what they want to accomplish. One needs to be conscious of the point made by George Bernard Shaw about socialism and politics in general in relation to Bahai activity and that is the tendency to evaluate ones fellow members by how many meetings to which they come or go.

"The trouble with socialism," Shaw once said, "is that there are too many meetings." Universal participation, though, I would argue, is a more achievable entity in this new culture where the menu of activities to chose from is greater. There is something for everyone to do, if they want to be a participant and, if the various instititutional organizers arrange things to enable community members to feel they are participating, however humbly, however simply and minimally. Of course, the line between "anything will do" and "do whatever you want" and actual participation in this new paradigm may wind-up being one with a very fine distinction if universal participation is actually achieved. On the other hand, if the criteria for participation in the new Bahai culture, if the bar is set too high, to use a modern and popularized expression, then universal participation will remain as elusive as ever.

A note of practical realism must often be struck as one goes about the utopian tasks the Bahai community has set itself in order to keep its expectations at levels which will not be productive of disappointment and discouragement. To keep othemselves motivated to achieve greater success there are many roads to travel. There are also many roads to take them down which decrease their levels of participation. And then, to draw on a famous poem by the American Robert Frost, there are roads less traveled by others and as he says, "they may make all the difference." Some members of the Bahai community attend virtually every gathering and some attend virtually none; some are 50-50; some 60-40. The variations are infinite. Everyone has a part to play if they want to be a part of this new Bahai culture, and if the various institutions of the Cause define participation in a flexible and diverse, inclusive and non-absolutist manner, as I have mentioned above. In this new Bahai culture the definitions of participation have made universal participation just about guaranteed...but not quite. There is always a but!

Everyone will, in the end, be a part of the Bahai community, will be part and parcel of that all-inclusive, world-wide participation if they are faithful to the core elements of the Covenant and recognize the Supreme Body as the fully legitimate institutional interpreter of the Word and the Texts. If, on the other hand, only a small handful of explicit criteria for participation are used to define the engagement of the individual Bahai in the community programs--as one does hear from overly exthusiastic individuals who are keen to get everyone going their way--then, inevitably, participation rates--or the ever elusive goal of universal participation--will continue to be just that--elusive. There is, too, an element of uncertainty, ambiguity and arbitrariness either latent or manifest, or both, in community life. These realities can only be held in check to an extent by customary forms, routines and regularities of the social and community existence.

The Bahai community is not a formal educational institution which has compulsory attendance and a degree, a diploma or a certificate at the end, although there are certainly some aspects of the paradigm which are formal, systematic, organized and require attendance in order to move from one step to another. Within this paradigm, within the international Bahai community there are schools, certificates of attendance, indeed, the whole panoply and pageantry of the educational apparatus found in the vast secular society of which the Bahai community is but a small part. Those remarks of that English critic Shaw about meetings are useful to emphasize from time to time as each Bahai, as he or she desires, goes from Ruhi Book 1 to Book 8, attends devotional meetings, LSA meetings, cluster meetings and, if he or she is involved with youth or children, one of these programs or one of many other community activities.

This new paradigm of learning and growth is not like that Anisa Model which was current in the Bahai community back in the early 1970s. This new paradigm has some of the goals, the aims and purposes of that Anisa Model for educational planning: it attempts to translate potentiality into actuality; it attempts to interpret large fields of reality; it attempts to transform experience into attitude and unify factual knowledge and belief; it emphasizes interaction with the enviroment as the general means by which the process of translating potentality into actuality is sustained; it is a process with an order and a rhythm; the role of the tutor is, in part, to help the student attain more learning competence and not just acquire more information; it aims to deal with content and process, with translating learning into service and activity. Albert Schweitzer's words apply as much now in this new paradigm as in the years when the Anisa Model inspired some of the Bahai community with its learning model. Schweitzer wrote: "I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know; the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve." How true it is Albert! How true it is! Such a simple aphorism, a simple remedy but, so often, easier said than done for many.

I encourage readers to google the Anisa Model and the various deepening programs--like one entitled the Bahai Comprehensive Deepening Program(USA, 1974)--once in existence and still available in the Bahai community for comparisons and contrasts with this new paradigm and its new culture of learning and community growth. The exercise for readers will be, hopefully, a heuristic one for the Bahai community has always been engaged in learning and growth. Readers will also gain an insight into how this new paradigm is so much more than the deepening programs of the years 1936/7 to 1996/7 ever were. This new paradigm has not sprung-up ex nihilo. It has profited much from those many decades of experience with growth and learning, with teaching and consolidation, with service and community building.

MY ROLE IN THIS NEW PARADIGM

As I have pointed out in the opening passages of this book, and as I repeat from time to time to give what I feel is a necessary emphasis, this work is highly idiosyncratic and focuses on my own role in this new Bahai culture. By 2003, forty years into "the war" which I have mentioned above and which I had become a part of as a member of that 'army-of-light' I had become quite ill. I do not want to go into the details of this illness here, but readers can examine my illness in some detail here at BLO in a 60,000++ word 150 page document entitled "my chaos narrative." My illness prevented me from actively participating in many of the aspects of this new Bahai culture. But my illness also forced me to focus on what I could do, on what was within my capacity and, as the House of Justice often put it, "as my circumstances permitted." What follows then is a result, an outline, of what I have been doing and will do in the years ahead. This book deals as much with my experience, my story within this new paradigm, as with the generalities of the paradigm itself. But my story is not so much narrative, as analysis. This book is no life-narrative, engaging story-line, novelistic exercise to keep readers involved until the last page as any thriller trys to do.

In many of the writings one comes across on the internet, as I have already pointed out, one sees negative and earnest presentations of views and experiences, some within the paradigm and some without. Of course, one comes across earnest presentations of views off the internet in simple daily conversations. Such earnestness is part of the very core of Bahai experience along with humour and the many things that are part and parcel of people in community. This has always been the case for me in the more than half a century I have been a Bahai. Sometimes these views one comes across in cyberspace are intended, as I have also emphasized above, as a detached commentary on a body of supposedly neutral facts gathered in a seemingly dispassionate way through much patient or not so patient experience and research. Sometimes these views are not so detached. Sometimes the internet posts carry with them a venom and a bitterness that has resulted from some negative experience of an individual.

It is difficult to go through a Bahai life for years without experiencing some challenges to ones personality, to ones way of being, to the core of one's life, challenges that hurt and hurt deeply. In the years before this paradigm, when there was no internet to read, none of the sad tales of the seering emotional experiences of others were as accessible in print form as they now are. One could keep oneself insulated from the exit-narratives, as one Bahai writer calls some of the experiences of marginal Bahais who eventually left the Cause. Now, if one wants in this new paradigm one can read a variety of these experiences of Bahais who passed from marginality to apostasy, of people who are or were preoccupied with a variety of campaigns against the Bahai community. I was aware of such campaigns in the years before this new paradigm for such campaigns have been part of Bahai history since its inception. But the presence of such campaigns on the internet at a few clicks of the wrist was a new experience for me and for many of my fellow believers.

For many, too, indeed for most of the Bahais, these stories were not part of their reading. They simply did not expose themselves to such accounts either because they had no access to the internet or, if they did, they simply did not read such accounts and, if they did read them, they never engaged in any written dialogue. I read a few of them but they were the sorts of accounts I had heard verbally in the decades before this new paradigm, in the decades before the internet became the public vehicle it became after the inception of this paradigm in the mid-1990s. Only on rare occasions did I engage with one of the many who had sad tales to tell. Suffering from mental illness as I had for years, I tended to focus my helping role, my compassion if one could call it that, on Bahai internet sites for the mentally-ill and others who experienced various traumatic disabilities. I also engaged in dialogue with various artistic and literary groups both within the Cause and without, sometimes defending the Faith as I went and often not discussing the Cause explicity at all.

Most Bahais I have come across on the internet at the many sites now available do not write more than a few lines here and there; most are not engaged in a critical examination of the Bahai community. Most Bahais on the internet are engaged in a wide variety of ways which it is not the purpose of this book to examine in any detail.

When many of these criticisms which I refer to above are examined at closer range the carefully constructed and sometimes scholarly illusions begin to rapidly fall apart. The most serious shortcoming of such criticisms, indeed the fatal one, is the use which is made of the sources. This is an old problem for critics and it will be one they will face increasingly in the decades ahead within this new paradigm. The problem takes several forms, the first of which is an attempt to provide in concise and orderly fashion the facts which have been established by E.G. Browne and other scholars. There is now a rich body of historical material on which to draw. The rise of the Bahai Faith in the 19th and early 20th century very early attracted an impressive group of scholars and observers: Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, A.L.M. Nicholas, Clement Huart, E.G. Browne, Alexander Tumansky, Baron Victor Rosen, Mirza Kazem Bek, and Hermann Roemer, to mention only the most important. (See Douglas Martin, The Missionary as Historian, footnote # 7: E.G. Browne provides a valuable bibliography on the Babi and Bahai Faiths prior to 1917 in two of his works: A Traveller's Narrative Written To Illustrate the Episode of the Bab, trans. Edward G. Browne (Cambridge, England: The Univ. Press, 1918), pp. 175-243.)

Of course, there are criticisms written by non-Bahais with academic credentials and levels of scholarship and reading far in excess of my own and I can not compete on the playing field of such discussions. I simply do not know enough; I have to leave the defence of the Cause in relation to such critics to other Bahais with the academic knowledge. We all have to do this. Until this new paradigm the critics were usually in learned journals and now they are more accessible, if one wants to access them, on the internet. This is a new problem in the Bahai community and each Bahai deals with this problem in his or her own way.

A book written by a disinterested non-Bahá’í scholar about the Faith, as the House of Justice emphasized in a recent letter, even if it reflects certain assumptions and puts forward conclusions acceptable within a given discipline but which are at variance with Bahá’í belief, poses no particular problem for Bahá’ís, who would regard these perceptions as an honest attempt to explore a religious phenomenon as yet little understood generally. Any non-biased effort to make the Faith comprehensible to a thoughtful readership, however inadequate it might appear, would evoke genuine Bahá’í appreciation for the perspective offered and research skill invested in the project. The matter is wholly different, however, when someone intentionally attacks the Faith whether they be non-Bahai scholars, leavetakers and defectors, disenrolled Bahá'ís or X-Bahá'ís, terms that came to be applied in the early years of this paradigm to those who had left the Cause, or apostates, those involved in contested exits and affiliated with some oppositional coalition to the Cause.

An inescapable duty devolves upon the friends, the Supreme Body went on to say, so to situate themselves in the knowledge of the Teachings as to be able to respond appropriately to the challenges of critics as they arise and thus uphold the integrity of the Faith. In the last decade on the internet, 2001 to 2011, I have come to so situate myself to "respond appropriately." The words of Bahá’u’lláh Himself shed light on the proper attitude I should adopt. He warns the believers “not to view with too critical an eye the sayings and writings of men”. “Let them”, He instructs, “rather approach such sayings and writings in a spirit of open-mindedness and loving sympathy." Those people who have been led, in their inflammatory writings, to assail the tenets of the Cause of God, are to be treated differently, Bahaullah Himself emphasizes. "It is incumbent upon all men, each according to his ability, to refute the arguments of those that have attacked the Faith of God.” The internet, since the outset of this new paradigm, has offered an excellent venue for such lance and parry activity.

According to my ability I engage in defence of the Cause on the internet. I have come to see this as a legitimate, and often useful, activity for me as a Bahai. It was an activity I had been engaged in, anyway, for decades but not in such a public manner as the internet. What I wrote became easily accessible by others who wanted to read what I wrote. This activity is, in some ways, not an explicit part of the new paradigm, but it is a task I have set myself within the confines of my abilities and interests. This writing is also a simple manifestation, a result, a form, of individual initative. On the other hand, I have no difficulty seeing my role on the internet as a Bahai actively involved in this new paradigm with its wide menu of choices for engagement. I see myself as involved in: strengthening the pattern of expansion and consolidation; developments at the more profound level of culture; the steady increase in the tempo of teaching, a fundamental feature of Bahai life, across the globe; conversations with souls; participation in community building; study and service carried out concurrently; the active agency of my own learning; an increasing understanding of the importance of humility, delighting in the accomplishments of others and realizing there are no formulas and no shortcuts; a capacity building that is long-term; lending assistance to the building of a global civilization; contributing my part to a rich tapestry of community life; contributing to prevalent and relevant discourses in society; a type of social action that can not be measured by an ability to bring enrolments; not projecting an air of triumphalism and; finally, not being premature in my various forms of social engagement. All these phrases can be found in the Ridvan message of 2010.

To those whose familiarity with Bahai history is limited, and this is often a significant portion of the Bahais in the many clusters, they are placed in the difficult position of being unable to defend the Cause from outside criticism due to their limited knowledge. For the most part this does not matter since most of the Bahais on the internet do not engage in the endless historical and theological hairsplitting, the casuistry regarding the new Bahai paradigm and the culture of learning and growth with which it is associated. In this paradigm, though, this engagement in literary dialogue is increasing. Bahai intellectuals and non-intellectuals are coming home to roost; Bahais with academic backgrounds from the physical and biological sciences, the humanities and the social sciences can be found all over the internet as can those without academic credentials but who like to write, like to argue a case, like to state a view often at variance with either orthodoxy or convention. There are many in life, both on and off the internet, who enjoy argument, with disagreement, with playing devil's advocate, so to speak.

At the other end of the literary spectrum are the Bahais on the internet who write in phrases and single sentences and rarely put more than two or three lines of print into a post. The internet, like the real world, is a place for people of all kinds, all capacities and talents: good writers and poor writers, writers of excess and high ability as well as writers of more modest talents who write in various quantities and qualities. The internet, like this book, is a pot-pourri of people, places and things, analyses and observations, cut-and-thrust, backs-and-forths. In the case of this book, though, I like to think the process of literary expression here is one characterized by a high degree of civility and etiquette of expression as well as that brilliant inventiveness which one noted Bahai writer said was a useful quality in consultation. Bahais are encouraged to aim high. I leave it to readers to assess whether, in fact, that aim has been achieved in this book. One can but try.

A different type of challenge had arisen on the internet, when an individual or group, using the privilege of Bahá’í membership, adopts various means to impose personal views or an ideological agenda on the Bahá’í community. In one recent instance, for example, an individual has declared himself a Bahá’í theologian, writing from and for the Bahai community with the aim to criticize, clarify, purify and strengthen the ideas of the Bahá’í community, to enable Bahá’ís to understand their relatively new Faith and to see what it can offer the world. Assertions of this kind, the Universal House of Justice made clear in a recent letter, "go far beyond expressions of personal opinion which any Bahá’í is free to voice." Here was a claim, the House of Justice went on to say, that was well outside the framework of Bahá’í belief and practice. The book in which the views were expressed was not reviewed before publication and the author was removed from membership rolls by the House of Justice. This was toward the end of the first decade of this new paradigm.

It seemed to me that what the House of Justice was doing was nipping in the bud an individual's attempt, an individual's assertion of what amounted to a declaration of 'theologian status.' Perhaps the attempt was unintended, but the Bahai Faith has no caste with ecclesiastical prerogatives, prerogatives that seek to foist or impose in even an indirect way some self-assumed authority upon the thought and behavior of the mass of believers. Bahaullah has prescribed a system that combines democratic practices with the application of knowledge through consultative processes. It seems to me that to call oneself "a Bahai theologian" is like calling oneself "a Bahai poet." I am, indeed, a poet; but I am a poet who is a Bahai. The distinction is not arbitrary but goes to the heart of Bahai ideology, philosophy, politics, theory and practice. As the artist Mark Tobey once quoted Shoghi Effendi: 'there is no official Bahai art.' This is also true of music and theology. What is official comes from the writings and the Supreme body: all else is interpretation. When someone is removed from membership, it is always a test not only for the person involved but for those around him or her since such an act seems to be a contradiction to the entire ethos of what the Bahai Faith is about. It is one of the many aspects of Bahai life and belief which is far from easy, far from the notion of liberalism which characterizes so much of the Cause.

Every individual has the right to hold and express personal views. I do this, have done and will do in the years ahead as a writer and poet, an editor and publisher. This does not mean, however, that whatever I say is always consistent with the Bahá’í Teachings. Bahá’u’lláh has established the criteria for understanding and practicing His Faith, and no one who professes to be a Bahá’í can systematically propagate personal interpretations that violate these criteria. An individual who insists upon a personal view in an effort to change the essential character of the Faith places himself outside the circle of Bahá’í belief. This has been true in the last half century of my Bahai experience as I have gone about getting what I write in book form reviewed by various reviewing committees to which I have sent my books.

My treatment of whatever topics I have dealt with in my books must be factually accurate, philosophically sound and must meet the approval of whatever authorized reviewing body examines my work. What I write and the extent that I use the various themes I do can not be done as a vehicle to justify and underpin some personal authority. For I have no authority. I am free to criticize, clarify, purify and strengthen the ideas of the Bahá’í community but not from a position of any presumed authority, not outside the system of Bahai review.

If the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States chooses not to market the books of Kalimát Press through Bahá’í agencies, bookshops or other venues in that country, they have that right. Individuals and institutions have not been prevented from purchasing Kalimát’s books or from keeping them in their libraries. Rather, the National Assembly has simply decided that Bahá’í agencies will not sell Kalimat Press's books. The general policy in this regard, well-known to Bahá’ís, to Bahai institutions and Bahai publishers of Bahá’í books, is that even after a text is reviewed, publishers have the right to decide what books they will carry and promote. A National Spiritual Assembly, through its Publishing Trust or any other agency, decides what books will be stocked, promoted and advertised for sale. I have written several books and none of them are for sale in Bahai bookshops. One has been reviewed; no Bahai publisher wants to sell them in a hard cover since I have been told the books are not likely to sell well. And so I have made them available as ebooks and have been given permission to do so.

I mention all of the above simply to comment on some of the developments within the Bahai community during this paradigm, developments of interest to me, if not to the readers of this book. They are developments of interest to me because they relate to the role I am playing as a Bahai--not within the major features of this new paradigm: the institute process, the Ruhi books, the study circles, inter alia--but within the larger context of expansion and consolidation, within my capacity to converse with others on spiritual matters and speak about this new Revelation. I see my work, especially on the internet, as part of the steady increase in the tempo of teaching across the globe, part of the discharge of my fundamental spiritual obligation, an indispensable feature of my Bahai life, and an exercise of individual initiative, a quality often given emphasis by the Central Figures of the Cause and its appointed interpreters.(Ridvan, 2010)

Much of the field of criticism that I come across on the internet is somewhat esoteric but, given the increasing interest in Iran, in Israel and in the Middle East in general, for many reasons, there has been an increasing interest in the Bahai Faith. Topics which formerly did not arouse any public interest in relation to the Cause are now doing so. The field of historical and textual studies of the Babi and Bahai Faiths is one in which controversies abound. Non-Bahai researchers often disagree with Bahai accounts and interpretations of the movement's history and doctrine. Sometimes non-Bahai critics are unduly dismissive of the work produced by scholars who happen to be Bahais. They often see Bahai scholars as essentially learned apologists due to their willingness to accept prior review of their work, who slavishly follow 'a party-line' while pretending to be independent scholars. The result is often long-winded internet exchanges of interest to a few, read by a small section of the Bahai community, contributing little to the community in general, but having the function of defining the limits, the structure of freedom for the Bahai community by means of its Administrative Order.

Within this framework of freedom, a pattern is set for institutional and individual behaviour which depends for its efficacy not so much on the force of Bahai law and Bahai institutional policy, which admittedly must be respected, as on the recognition of a mutuality of benefits and on the spirit of cooperation. This spirit is maintained by the willingness, the courage, the sense of responsibility and the initiative of individuals---all expressions of individual devotion and submission to the will of God as defined by the House of Justice. As the House of Justice emphasized(29/12/88)in one of its extensive and important letters on the questions of freedom and authority--among other issues--there exists a balance in the Cause in relation to freedom between the institutions and the individuals who sustain their existence. When this balance is not achieved, when the standard of public discussion is not high, when candour and civility are not combined in proper measure, when discussions are conducted which undermine the authority of the institutions, the order of the Cause itself is endangered. The Guardian emphasized this during a major paradigm shift entre deux guerres in the 1920s. The House of Justice has reiterated this theme, this same emphasis, and I'm sure it will be a thread of concern long into the future of this Faith as it goes from strength to strength in the decades ahead.

Another variety of criticism in the last 15 years are those critiques associated with: the many exit-narratives, contested and uncontested; the apostate stories and a varied mix of leavetakers. Many marginal and peripheral members of the Bahai community, people who for decades were just considered inactive with the associated and seemingly endless discussions of how to encourage their participation, have written often sad accounts of their experience in the Bahai community. There are new web sites for X-Bahais, unenrolled Bahais, disenrolled Bahais, orthodox Bahais, dissatisfied Bahais, Bahais on the attack, subversive Bahais, indeed, a range of the strangest bedfellows imaginable. There are personal situations described in great detail, in many degrees and varieties of dissidence and disunity; there are covenant-breakers and quasi-covenant-breakers and all of this is mixed in with devoted believers, enthusiasts, the dedicated and the sincere.

Most of the organized and collective activity in many of these categories takes place only on the internet and, since most of the Bahai community's five to seven million adherents are not on the internet, the international Bahai community is not affected by all this coming and going, all this verbiage, however justified or not justified, however eloquent and well-reasoned, however poorly argued and shrill, however intellectually impoverished or erudite. For many of the Bahais like myself who have been around for decades, in my case since the 1950s, much of this negative verbiage has arisen only during this new paradigm and only on the internet,although much of the dialogue, the points at issue, have been heard before but not in writing. Such stories were heard in the back-blocks, the stories of the disaffected. Disaffection in the community, as in most communities of any substance with peoples lives and commitments at stake, is part of the drama of community, of social, life. Work and participation in the Bahai community is not an easy process as any veteran of decades will easily attest and as new recruits will soon find out.

Some of the critics one encounters on the internet are people with an obsession. Although some of these critics have a wide ambit of interests by profession or by inclination or by both, they have come to focus a great part of their energies as writers and internet posters on the subject of the Bahai Faith. It often seems to this writer as if the final flowering of the writing of some of these critics has become a preoccupation with criticism of the Bahai Faith. Some of these critics do not regard their subject with any affection and readers are cautioned not be distracted even momentarily by the introduction of academic conventions in the writings of some of these critics. Others, of course, have a genuine love of the Cause. There has come to be a mixed bag of folks on the net and readers need to keep a watchful eye on what my wife calls "their credentials." What is their status in the Bahai community as defined by the House of Justice, if that institution has in fact made some statement about their position. If one is unsure one can always consult with someone on the apppointed side of the Cause or one of the many elected institutions. The Bahai Faith has developed an extensive apparatus of protective institutions out of necessity over the more than 150 years of its history.

Many critics possess a highly partisan opinion of the Bahai Faith which is often formed by some personal and negative experience with a Bahai, a group of Bahais or one of the institutions of the Cause. To what extent these views have come to represent the results of objective, concrete experience and reality and to what extent they are the spontaneous reaction to the barren and not-so-barren fields of interpersonal conflict is impossible for the impartial observer to know as they read the internet accounts, most of the time. Posts, articles, blogs, message boards, ebooks, indeed, an increasingly wide range of critical apologetics are sometimes heavily footnoted, drawing as I say on an apparently wide range of sources. While a degree of animus is unmistakable, the authors sometimes pay an occasional conventional tribute to the sacrifices which Bahais have made for their beliefs. After nearly sixty years of association with this new world religion, listening to the criticism of others is not a new experience for me. I would go so far as to say: I have heard most of the venom before which I have come across on the internet in the last 15 years. Australia is an anti-authoritarian culture and given to a good deal of criticism of others. In addition, Bahaullahs emphasis on not gossiping and keeping one's criticism mild is due to the difficulty most people have in implementing His advice in this critical area of community life. This whole domain is given a high priority in Bahai morality because it is so very prevalent or because it is so very difficult to achieve or, I think much more importantly, because it is so very important to the development of trust and confidence as well as any sane and meaningful community life.

This religion is made up of people, fallible people, people who are far from perfect, and they often rub each other the wrong way. In the process people's feelings are often hurt to the point where they can take no more and you don't see them anymore. Large segments of many Bahai national communities have what the Bahai community has for years called, as I say, 'the inactive believer.' And more than this, large segments of many communities have members without addresses or means of being contacted. The Bahai Faith is not a tea-party, often inspite of appearances to the contrary. Bahai community life is often demanding as is any other organization with a significant role to play in society. To play a part in its culture has, from my point of view, never been easy. This will be true in this new paradigm and even more as this Faith expands and plays an even more important role in society in this new millennium.

Some critics on the internet and not on the internet do not seem to be able to leave Mason Remey alone and the Orthodox Bahais who have come after him. Remey's unsuccessful efforts to create a rift in the membership of the Faith is no doubt relevant to any comprehensive discussion of modern Bahai history from the later 1950s onward, but his efforts can usually be more than adequately dealt with in a paragraph, illustrated by an extract from one of Mr. Remey's statements, if that seems necessary to the writer's argument. To present a figure like Remey as a major historical source on Bahai history is unacceptable in any serious argument, at least to me. Mr. Remey was an aged man at the time he produced his polemical writings against the Custodians in the late 1950s and 1960s. His condition made him seem, to many, a pathetic figure and his mental state could not have been unknown to anyone in even limited contact with him. His statements throw no light whatever on the extraordinary expansion of the Bahai Faith in the past seven decades, decades both before and after Remey's death in 1974.

Few people, either within the Bahai Faith or outside, took seriously Mr. Remey's pretensions, and he died in his hundredth year, bereft of supporters or attention. But the Orthodox Bahais can be found on the internet as if they represented a split in the Cause. Not all the Babis became Bahais in the 1860s and 1870s but the notion that there was a split in the Cause is a piece of historical casuistry which I imagine will be with us for decades if not centuries to come. A tiny storm can be made in a tea-cup as we used to say. I've heard that story and seen that tea-cup around for my entire life as a Bahai.

According to the court documents themselves there are only about thirty followers of the so-called Orthodox Bahá'í Faith or Remeyites, as I prefer to call them. But the real problem with the discussion in the last decade, and particularly since the reopening of the court-case in the USA, is that it distorts the subject. The National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá'ís of the United States has been merely attempting to enforce an *existing* court order which came as a result of a lawsuit the Remeyites had themselves filed in 1964. In that lawsuit anf under Mason Remey's direction, they themselves attempted to claim a monopoly, not only over the term "Bahá'í" but to claim all Bahá'í properties as well. Had Mason Remey believed this was something that should be decided in hearts and minds, and not in the courts, this court order would never have been issued in the first place.

Remey, by the way, accepted that court order and ordered his organization to disband and stop using the term "Bahá'í." That is when Joel Marangella broke with Mason Remey and claimed the Guardianship for himself, forming the "Orthodox Bahá'í Faith." Their argument has been that since they are a separate organization they are not bound by the court order issued against Mason Remey's organization. The National Spiritual Assembly holds that this new organization was but a subterfuge around the court's original decision. This is what is being argued in the last year or so before the Court of Appeals. It is an issue of who owns the Bahá'í trademarks, not which faction is really 'orthodox.' The National Spiritual Assembly is not trying to infringe on anyone's religious liberty, merely to safeguard the names and symbols of their own organization.

The Bahai Faith does not have what in Islam has been called ‘takfir’. Sen McGlinn makes this point in his essay "Defending Shoghi Effendi." Bahais can not call other people kafir, infidel or unbeliever with the resulting ruling that their marriage is annulled and they become in the process ‘unclean.’ In the Bahai Faith there are not a group of believers who have to go through acts of purification before saying their prayers if they have contact with such persons; for example, because his beliefs were thought to be unorthodox, Shaykh Ahmad was subject to a takfir issued by the religious leaders of Qazvin.The term takfir derives from the word kafir,impiety, and is described as when one who is, or claims to be, a Muslim is declared impure. Those to whom takfir is applied are considered excommunicated in the eyes of the Muslim community. The Bahai Faith has no takfir in at least two senses: there is no concept that anyone is ‘unclean,’ and being declared a covenant-breaker does not affect one’s legal status or rights. It’s simply a non-confrontational strategy for dealing with conflict. By separating, as Baha’u'llah separated from Azal in the Istanbul period, the true value of each group will become evident. In practice it has usually amounted to giving the person or persons enough rope to hang themselves, so to speak. If there is a real positive value in the position held by the person; they are simply removed from the community, that becomes evident over time.

Of course, the Supreme Body has the authority to judge a person's religious beliefs and declare someone a non-believer, unenrolled or disenrolled, or a covenant-breaker. The House of Justice has the authority to disenroll or unenroll a Bahai. Abdu’l-Baha said that it is not permissible to silence or humiliate others. The House does not silence anyone; the unenrolled Bahai is free to express his views but not as a declared Bahai. The Bahai approach really is a non-confrontational stance, intended to exclude all kinds of personal attacks, labelling, infringement of rights etc.. When the Supreme Body excludes a Bahai from membership that, of course, has a labelling effect. The person so excluded becomes an outsider, marginal. One can use one of several other terms. That doesn’t mean there is no apologetics; there are still arguments about the issues; it is difficult not to be involved in some labelling of the person, direct and/or indirect. If someone is an apostate, that’s not a label used to humiliate someone who thinks they are a believer. The term was used, for example, by Shoghi Effendi, in its correct sense for someone who has turned their back on one religion and joined another. As in much theological discussion, though, useless hairsplitting definitions abound, empty and profiless debates with a vain concatenation of imaginings that leadto no result except acrimony.(SDC, p.106)

Removal from Bahai membership seems to be a different thing than apostasy in recent useage both in and off the internet. There are varying significances to being accepted as part of the Muslim `ummah, to being declared an infidel or kafir, to being a church member or to being excluded from sacraments. It is partly a matter of personal identity and sometimes even salvation. Enrollment in the Bahai community is given a different weight than in the examples I have given above from Islam and Christianity--depending on what Bahai institution is doing the enrolling. There are still some countries and territories among the 246 in the wide-wide world where there is no enrollment. There have been many exemplary Bahais in the history of the Cause long before enrollment even existed. We can perfectly accurately say that Abu’l-Fadl was not enrolled, but he was certainly a Bahai, arguably the most erudite in Bahai history.

So far as I understand it--and this is something the House of Justice will in all likelihood clarify in this new paradigm--being on the membership rolls is meant to be like voluntary membership of an association, which is a free choice on both sides. There are procedures and reasons for taking away membership or not giving it in the first place and these are exercised by Bahai institutions. Sometimes no explanation is given. It’s like the coach deciding who doesn’t make the cut. It's also part of the Bahai religion, a part which is not popular among what might be called the more liberal of the Bahais. Although there are not official liberal and conservative Bahais, the issue often has more to do with Bahais simply accepting what the House does, what it writes and what it implements in the Bahai community as expression of official institutional policy. Again, for some Bahais this is not always easy and when it becomes too difficult for their reasoning minds to accept some feel they must tender their resignations. In a community of millions of souls this, it seems to me, is occasionally inevitable. Much in the Bahai Cause is simple, very very simple. But much is also complex: very, very complex.

The reason for the policy of shunning the violators has not been that they had a different religion, it has been because there is such a thing as a Covenant, and the Covenant is no trifle to be played with. The Covenant, combined with the policy that we do not use violence, or in any way discriminate against the legitimate rights of the covenant-breakers, but simply leave them to God, is the greatest protection for the children and great-great-grandchildren of Bahais from the curse of sectarian strife that has clouded the light of both Christianity and Islam. The blood on the robes of past religions comes not just from their lack of an explicit written covenant identifying the successor to the Founder and His authorities, but also from the lack of a clear principle that sectarian tendencies must be seriously combatted. Shunning those who form sects is a serious means of combatting schizmatic, sectarian, tendencies.

I have found Momen's article in the journal Religion(2007) entitled: Marginality and Apostasy in the Bahai Community has provided a helpful overview of much of the content in the above paragraphs and I encourage readers to examine this article and the internet discussion which it provoked to get a better handle on these many themes, some rather complex to understand. I have been involved directly with this issue of marginality and the kinds of concerns expressed by Kalimat Press since I was the editor of the arts section of Dialogue magazine back in the mid-1980s. So many of these problems are not new but a new generation of Bahais gets exposed to them on the internet or not exposed to them as the case may be. Bahais who don't spend much time engaged in these internet discussions and prefer to read and interact on other subjects with other groups of people, for the most part, never come across these issues and for the most part never take an interest in them. There is a complexity to all these terms and statuses in the community and, unless one is engaged in internet discussions on these subjects or takes some academic interest in the casuistry associated with these discussions, participants in this new Bahai culture can simply give it all a miss---and not miss anything. I have sometimes involved in these issues of membership because of my extensive internet teaching in literally hundreds of discussions over the years of this paradigm but, for the most part, I avoid the exit-narratives, the covenant-breaking sites, the endless bickering which can be found here and there in cyberpsace.

Few if any of the Christian and Islamic writers who have chosen to attack the Bahai Faith over the past several decades have shown the patience to try to grasp the fundamental distinction between the Bahai Faith and previous religions. On the individual believer the divine command of this Cause lays the duty of acting with love, mercy, forbearance and forgiveness. Going one step beyond the so-called "Golden Rules" of earlier stages in mankind's moral evolution, Bahaullah calls upon the individual to "prefer others" to himself and teaches that such a standard is the only basis upon which the Bahai principle of "unity in diversity" can be realized, with all its implications for the protection of individual identity and the avoidance of dissention and the wide variety of interpersonal conflicts that can be avoided with the use of a battery of virtues and interpersonal skills. Preferring others to oneself, like the golden Rule itself, will keep each Bahai spiritually busy for generations, if not millennia, to come---or so it would seem to we who are part of the skeptical and cynical, critical and untrusting generations at the turn of the third millennium. In many ways it is easier to study and explore the principles than to practice them in daily life given their number and the very high standard that the Bahai community is asked to reach in their execution.

No one would claim that the high standards of Bahai morality are easily achieved, but they are essential parts of Bahai morality and community life if, indeed, that community is to be worthy of its name and if it is to attract others to it in the context of this new Bahai culture of learning and growth. For followers of previous religions, faith and virtue, belief and practice has been essentially an individual matter. The individual is saved alone, and society as such is irredeemable. At least this contemptus mundi as it is sometimes called is often, if not always, the case. Any social theology, if you can call it that, varies of course from denomination to denomination, sect to sect, cult to cult, branch to branch and religious division to division. The "coming of the Kingdom" is for the most part an event outside history, often so far outside indeed as to occur in another world entirely.

To be sure, these basic elements of Christian theology have been so muddied, as I say, by conflicting sectarian interpretations and by twentieth-century attempts to create a "social gospel" that the intellectual issues associated with this social gospel probably have little relevance for the average member of most Christian churches. Yet Pauline theology itself has not changed. However weakened or inarticulate, it continues to appear in habits of thought and in assumptions which reveal their presence when a mind conditioned by them tries to grapple with new elements in religious truth. And the Bahai Faith contains many new elements of religious truth. Although this religion has a preeminent simplicity, it also possesses a complexity which will keep the finest intellectuals, thinkers and social analysts busy for millennia to come.

In recent decades, with a vast increase in education and the simultaneous breakdown of ecclesiastical authority, the open vilification of religions continues in some circles and has given way to caution in others. Some of the anti-Bahai polemic on the internet is a representative example of the former and some of the latter. But the spirit and the essential methods of critique continue with the centuries. The aim so often is to attack and create contempt and aversion for beliefs which differ from one's own. The perennial explanation is that truth must be served, whatever the cost to human sensitivities. It would obviously be pointless and unseemly to dignify such arguments with any serious attention in the face of the methods by which earnest polemicists seek to serve their conception of truth. To many, of course, religion is simply irrelevant, but this has been the case in the West for decades and in some places for literally centuries as anyone with some familiarity with history over the last several centuries on this planet can easily testify.

Perhaps Bahais can regard the persistent efforts of some critics and their seeming obsession with the Bahai Faith with a certain degree of equanimity. Whatever interest these critics may arouse that interest must inevitably excite a wider discussion of their Founder's message, well, sometimes anyway! If at the same time such criticism stimulates Bahaullahs followers to a deeper study of the implications of that message, as it often does in the lives of some Bahais, these Bahais will surely have derived much benefit from such an experience. Believers in all ages before the present have had similar experiences in dealing with critics. The gradual but unmistakable disappearance, too, of the ecclesiastical profession around the world seems likely to be part of this overall process. Of course, where that profession has not disappeared, it is often held up to a ridicule which is so pervasive as to make religious belief a laugh in the eyes of millions in our secular age. This is not always the case as fundamentalism continues to capture much ground.

CRITICISM FROM WITHIN THE CAUSE

Most of the critics of the Cause whom I have encountered on the net are not believers in traditional religions but this, I'm sure, will change in the years of this new paradigm. This is not to say that such believers are not present, but the main body of critics which Bahais have had to deal with thusfar in the first 15 years of this paradigm have been in the Cause in some way or another, at one time or another.

Some view dissent positively. In the context of the unassailable authority of the Bahai institutions, dissent is seen by some as a positive activity or response. Assailing the House of Justice is for some---a virtue. If the authority in question is unassailable, that is, not liable to doubt, attack, or question, then dissent is merely noise with no positive result. If the purpose of dissent is to create an atmosphere of discord, then one could argue that such an initiative might be considered successful. Much discord has indeed generated. In our highly adversarial world, this is not surpising. That this is often the case in some ways is just part of the air that is the very texture of our critical and secular society. Indeed it is a norm in some ways. To look at a dictionary or a thesaurus once again, though, dissension is defined as disagreement and it is often engaged in an especially partisan sense with contentious quarreling as a noisesome accompaniment. Dissent, then, for good old Roget and his thesaurus, is a synonym for discord.

It is the partisan nature of dissent, the seeming need for dissenters to attract others to their cause or position that is one of the major characteristics of the negative, soul-blighting essence, of dissent. Dissent often goes beyond free expression of opinion and becomes ego-centric and corrosive. Instead of saying "I offer these views for your consideration," the dissenter takes a much more strident and confrontational position. Dissent then becomes more fundamentalist in its confrontational, argumentative and oppositional nature; it often lacks any genuine etiquette of expression, any moderation and modesty. It proposes that only one side of the debate is possible, that only one view may be true. It is the five blind men examining the elephant picture with which we are all familiar. Were the one holding the trunk to say, "This animal appears like a snake; some aspect of the elephant is snakelike;" he would merely be expressing his opinion. But when he says "An elephant must be a snake; do not be fooled by others. Listen only to me, not the zoologists." In this context he is expressing dissent.

Dissention is a moral and intellectual contradiction to those who would be unifiers of the children of men. What is desired in interchange is a tolerant assertion of preference and not an intolerant insistence of agreement of finality. And if, one must assert some categorical imperative, some arbitary absolute, then calling down fire from heaven while one does the asserting is neither wise nor productive. To put this another way, the ends, the goals in a discussion should be seen as functional and relative and not be confused with objective complete reality. Reality here might be seen as a white light brokendown into the prism of human nature into a spectrum of values, derivative aspects of the same reality.

CONSULTATION

Consultation does not stress the emancipation, the freedom, from the authority and from the legitimacy of the organization. Rather, consultation is intimately bound up with and supportive of that authority and the institution that is the expression of that authority and within which that consultation takes place. At least this is the case with Bahai consultation in the myriad groups of Bahais on the planet. The very essence of groups of Bahais is some form of "social contract", some personal right that is offered to the group in exchange for some personal good. Bahais learn from the Writings what surrender is expected of them and some of that surrender is to the Administrative Order which they are asked to support. Just as you might surrender your right to drive in an intoxicated state in order that the forces of society will protect you from drunk drivers; so you relinquish certain rights, including the right of dissent, as part of your Bahai "social contract" which is actually with Bahauallah. This does not mean you cannot freely express your insights, ideas, or opinions; it is rather that such expression is done in the manner prescribed in the Writings: to uplift all, without dissent or discord. This is the theory but in practice it is often difficult to achieve the theoretical position or aim.

Principled dissent and dissension is not equivalent to unprincipled discord and disunity. The subject of disagreement in dialogue and consultation is a separate one that I cannot thoroughly deal with here. It is not my intention here to pummel readers with the Writings, chapter and verse, book by book, but if readers were to search on Ocean, an internet site with an extensive body of the Bahai Writings accessible with a few clicks of the fingers on your keyboard, or any one of several Bahai internet libraries for the word dissension or dissent, readers will readily see that what I am saying here is entirely consistent with these many references. This is not to say that the subject is complete at this point. The whole question of dissention is a complex one which I come at several time in this book from different perspectives. Although complex, the subject of harmonious dialogue is crucial to the process of the workings of Bahai administration. The Guardian wrote, as far back as 1923: "the Great Plan of the Future, as unfolded by the Master's Will and Testament, will be rudely disturbed and grievously delayed," indeed, "the whole structure is sure to crumble" if what he calls "this fundamental requisite" is not realized.(NSA, UHJ, 1972, pp.8-9.

Those with access to the internet, for the most part, dont seem to take part in the heated discussions, in the endless casuistry and hairsplitting, in the extensive analysis as well as the fine-tuning and the defining of terms. But for a coterie the action is hot and fast, furious and fastidious. A great deal of heat has been generated both within the parameters, within the box, of the paradigm and outside the box of this new culture of learning and growth since 1996. This heat is still, and has been, part and parcel of the thematics, part of the picture and part of the whole of the Bahai world for more than a decade now but, from my perspective living as I do in the Antipodes, the temperature is cooling. The heat may not be entirely off, but the waters are hardly boiling anywhere except, at least as I see it, on several internet locations. There has always been an element, a portion, of the community, with some axe to grind. This was true on 23 May 1844 within the Shaykhi school of the Ithna-Ashariyyih sect of Shi'ah Islam and it will, in all likelihood, be true for the entire history and future of the Cause, although I'm sure there will be some who will not agree with my emphasis here.

Before saying a few words about combating criticism the Guardian emphasized the problems associated with the unfettered freedom of the individual and the need to temper that freedom. High aims and pure motives must be supported by measures which are practical and methods which are sound. NSAs are trusted guardians and supreme authorities in all matters under their jurisdiction. The guidelines for mature deliberation are many but the capacity to put them into practice is often lacking. This problem will beset the implementation and success of this paradigm as it has always done in previous paradigms throughout the 17 decades of Bahai history. The dissipation of precious energies often results from the incapacity of the believers, from conflicts between personalities and these aspects of community life, aspects which have been present as I say since the start of Bahai history, need to be remembered when the hoped-for plans do not materialize as quickly as the Bahai community, and the individuals which compose it, would like.

The process is often, indeed, it has always seemed to me, in some ways---slow. This slowness, though, is a matter of perspective. Since my mother joined the Bahai Faith in 1953 the total number of Bahais globally has increased 30 times. One could argue that this has been an exponential growth. Toynbee alluded to this growth and to the Bahai Faith in general in the early 1950s as "the religion of Western civilization" when there were only about 200 thousand Bahais in the world. As the great body of humankind has been invaded byu violence and tempests of many and divergent kinds, as the remaining civilizations of the world were increasingly undermined by slow decay, this new and pure religion, humble in many ways insinuated itself into the remotest corners of the planet and the minds of men in the most unobtrusive ways; it has grown up in silence and obscurity, except in places of savage opposition and it aims to erect a triumphant banner on the ruins of planetized civilization by sensible and insensible degrees not unlike Christianity did some 2000 years ago.

COMBATING CRITICISM

The institutions of the Cause have tried to combat as effectively as they can the forces of separation and sectarian tendencies and to deal with equally divisive forces of extreme orthodoxy on the one hand and irresponsible freedom on the other and the tendency to divide the believers into categories such as deepened and uninformed. The institutions have continued to keep this Faith united as they have done thanks to the mystery and the wonder, the reality and practical efficacy, of the Covenant and they will continue to do so. The significnace of this accomplishment nor of the Covenant is hardly appreciated. A new, an additional, Book 8 on The Covenant has been added to the sequence of Ruhi resources recently aimed at giving Bahais an appreciation of this element of the basic core of Bahai beliefs and teachings. Keeping this Cause unified after nearly two centuries could well be considered its chief accomplishment. It is an accomplishment of enormous, of crucial, proportions. It is also an accomplishment that, in some important ways, is more of a process than an event for, as I say, the problems associated with disunity and divisiveness may always be with us. They are part of the reality of unity in diversity, harmony and dissonance, conflict and peace, the many and inevitable polarities of life itself. They are part of the very air we all breath and will have to continue to be worked through in this and future paradigms by both the institutions of the Cause and the individuals who are the community's warp and weft.

The institutions of the Cause use logic, argument and various forms of intellectual and moral suasion to make whatever cases need to be made to combat the critics and the concerned, the worried and the worrisome. These institutions do not expect every member of the community to think, to feel and to act in some preconceived way. To expect everyone to do the same thing would not only be unrealistic it would be absurd. I have discussed criticism above in some detail and, although criticism is itself not an explicit part of this new paradigm, I have chosen as one of my many roles on the internet to deal with it in the best ways I know how. I see this as a useful contribution to the work of the Faith.

Some Bahai centres, localities, groups and assemblies have more and some have less of such critical individuals. Only a relative few, as I say, ever put their complaints and contentions on the internet for all to see and even fewer ever get into the many historical issues which the Bahai Faith has dealt with in the last century and a half. Of course, all of this is part of the drama of people in community, in the Bahai community and this new paradigm will see more of this play of light and shadow, of enthusiasm and criticism in the years ahead. For it is all part of the greatest of all dramas for Bahais, for it is their lives and it is their communities; it is their history and their future--to say nothing of their present experience--with all the passions and prejudices, practices and policies that inevitably characterize an international organization of millions of people across more than 200 countries and territories on the planet.

A Bahá'í of many years experience is also aware of the reality of what might be called temporary religious enthusiasms, enthusiasms which return by degrees to their natural level and resume those passions and prejudices that have characterized their lives and to which they had adapted their daily lives before hearing of this new Faith. Not everyone who comes in contact with the immense Force that is the Bahai Faith is transformed and those who are transformed often do so by an insensible process, a process that is a far cry from that characterized by the firey zeal and heat of charismatic groups. It is also useful to emphasize as this Faith expands in the decades ahead, to say nothing of its expansion in the first century and a half, that this Cause often attracts what are sometimes called the poor in spirit who have minds afflicted by calamity. Such people are often attracted by the visions and promises, by some mysterious spark of truth and light; whereas those who are satisfied with the world's possessions and the so-called worldly-wise dispute the truths of the Cause with their superior reason and knowledge. Such people often bring so much doubt to the investigative process that the teachers of the Faith have little chance of success in winning over their adherence.

This book or long essay is, I like to think, part of the more moderate phase of discussion that has emerged in the last year or so. I like to think of this book as one among the many moderate voices that exist beside some of the more shrill voices that still can be heard in the international Bahai community of some 120,000 localities, 6,000 clusters and approximately six million adherents. Now that this new paradigm has been in place for some fifteen years most of the major criticisms have been raised that are going to be raised, although one should never speak too soon. The guidance Bahais now receive in relation to this new paradigm is not simply a list of suggestions from which individuals and institutions choose according to their own preferences. The question is not, as one writer put it succinctly, does the guidance and this paradigm apply to me but rather how does the guidance apply to my life and activities?

Acceptance of the paradigm is largely in place with the flow of achievements, successes and new victories heard increasingly. There are still, as I say, those unloving critics and the critical lovers amidst what seem to this writer an incredibly diverse mix of Bahais with varying degrees of submissiveness and devotion, action and inaction, consistent patterns and inconsistent, among the millions of adherents and servants of the Cause around the world. Most of the forms, the types, the content, of the incoming and outgoing criticism of this new Bahai culture, at least that I have read and listened to, are on the internet which, it should be emphasized, really only began to become the popular and frequently used medium of communication that it has become since the start of this new Bahai paradigm in the mid-1990s.

BAHAI APOLOGETICS AND THE CRITICS

Bahai apologists like myself need to be aware how easy it is to appear to be smug and attitudinally deficient in the eyes of critics. In the last 15 years the critics whom I have listened to for several decades in my private life are now on the internet and they represent a new force to be dealt with, arguably the first significant force of opposition, of dissention in the Cause, since the ministry of the Custodians from 1957 to 1963 and the entre deux guerres years of the 1920s and 1930s. There always seem to have been small pockets of intense opposition, though, in some form or another since I first became associated with this Cause in the early 1950s. On the internet I am now coming across people, some of whom claim to be Bahais, who do not view the official Bahai Faith as it is currently constructed as an authentic world religion. This should not surprise students of the Cause who know their Bahai history. Intense disagreement was present in 1844 when the Shaykhi community divided into the followers of the Bab and the followers of others. The history of the 1840s and the divisions in the Shaykhi community are interesting and I encourage readers to examine Momen's Introduction to Shi'i Islam.

Some of these internet participants see the Bahai Faith as a religious surrogate or substitute metaphor for a splinter faction of Shi'a Islam. Their descriptions of the Bahai Faith leave me wondering, at times, if the religion I believe in and the one they describe are the same thing. Some critics of this Faith go so far as to call it a family business! They go on to say that the Bahai Faith might have emerged as the meta-religion for humanity in this the new, this third, millenium but that it has instead become an obscure and isolated sect that places the idiosyncratic interpretations of Shoghi Effendi above the inclusive, culminatory revelation of Bahaullah. For them much of the development in the Cause since 1921 is a sham, a loss, and a pity. I have not had to deal with this, with views like these, in my lifetime, in my half century of membership in the Bahai community. Critical positions like this, clearly a form of covenant-breaking, had always in my lifetime as a Bahai been dealt with by Bahais assigned by the institutions of the Cause to deal with them. In this new paradigm, though, I have had to become much more informed, as have my fellow Bahais, if I and they are to deal with historical views and criticisms aimed at the core of my belief system, if I am to participate in some of the more critical internet discussions. I keep my participation limited and avoid the covenant-breaking sites for the most part. Occasionally I am drawn in out of a desire to deal with the often outrageous statements made by some posters at some sites.

In the past, as I say, if such views did emerge-and they did occasionally-they were dealt with by scholars in the Faith and I did not need to know more than the little that I knew. That does not seem to be the case any more, not in the years of this paradigm, at least not for me. In the end, of course, each Bahai will become as informed as he wishes, as he needs to be, as his cirumstances permit. The menu for his or her activities in this new paradigm is more extensive than it has ever been. The opportunities for engagement exist at all levels from non-participation to full and unfettered involvement in some aspect of the new culture of learning and growth.

In this new paradigm there are some 700 Bahais at the World Centre in Haifa whose work for the Cause is not in the form of an engagement in many of the aspects of this paradigm. This is partly because Bahais in Israel are not allowed to teach their Faith. As I have indicated elsewhere in this book, 1000s, if not millions, of Bahais live in isolated localities or in very small groups, groups without children or junior youth, little communities where intensive programs of growth can not be contemplated, places with Bahais who are illiterate, indeed, the new paradigm, all the features of this paradigm are simply not possible to implement or are, at best, "a work in progress."

"Just as in the world of politics there is need for free thought," Abdul-Baha was quoted at the turn of the 20th century as saying in The Promulgation of Universal Peace(p. 197), "likewise in the world of religion there should be the right of unrestricted individual belief. Consider what a vast difference exists between modern democracy and the old forms of despotism. Under an autocratic government the opinions of men are not free, and development is stifled, whereas in a democracy, because thought and speech are not restricted, the greatest progress is witnessed. It is likewise true in the world of religion. When freedom of conscience, liberty of thought and right of speech prevail--that is to say, when every man according to his own idealization may give expression to his beliefs--development and growth are inevitable."

It is the view of some critics of the Bahai Faith that there are far too many calculated attempts to dismiss the criticism, and limit the free expression of thought of those Bahais who seek to analyse this new relgion in some critical way or another. Some of these critics go on to point out that it is no longer possible to stifle the views of such critics. Criticisms must be heard. It is not enough to say, as these critics do, that the Bahais stifle criticism because criticism is an expression of a sense of self-importance or some personal entitlement on the part of the critic. These critics of the Cause see these attempts to block the critic and these insinuations of the stifling of views as a sign, a symptom of a weak and effete religion, unsure of itself and thus defensive. At the root of much criticism in the minds of these opponents of the way the Cause is administered is the endorsement of change in the direction they see that this Cause must go. This is, in some ways, not surprising, given that this Cause has come out of an obscurity in which it had been enshrouded for the first century and a half of its existence.

The American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson among others is quoted by some critics of the Faith to bolster their position, to bolster their concerns that the views of critics are not heard, not listened to. Emerson wrote that: "Change is the law of life and we consequently obey the law if we choose to live a life of change. Only conformists try to be fixed, and that in a democratic society, where change is allowed as a matter of principle, only conformists crave fixity." And so it is that the religion I have been associated with for more than half a century becomes seen, by some, as yet another religious group that is conformist, conservative, fixed in the past, rejecting of modernity and even intellectual tolerance, that regards criticism as tantamount to blasphemy, and that anathematizes the results of research in the social sciences as biased and materialist.

Such religious groups of which this Faith of mine is but one, and so these critics continue to argue, will inevitably become completely obscure and isolated, cut off from the mainstream of modern society, inhabiting a self-referential, hermetically-sealed, apocalyptic universe of their own. The adherents of such closed systems, of which the Bahai Faith has become one, have no recourse but to take a kind of perverse pride in their ignorance and intransigence and reject all counsel to the contrary. They are an insult to humanity, a sin against God, and a betrayal of Abdu'l-Bahá. On the internet one finds such views again and again in a great confrontation between unfettered liberal attitudes and extreme orthodoxy. If one does not read on the internet; if one only reads the messages of the institutions one does not come across such views. But over time, in the future years of this paradigm, Bahais will increasingly have to deal with all sorts of criticisms and the process has just begun in bits and pieces in these first two decades of this new paradigm.

Of course, the whole question of change and its causes could be made the subject of another book to add to the massive number of books already in existence on this complex subject in sociology, history and other social sciences and humanities. Wars and technological changes, economics and religion are often cited as the root causes of change in history. But this book, this analysis of the new Bahai paradigm, is not a piece of sociology or one of the other social sciences that seeks to offer an analysis of change. From a purely personal point of view and from the point of view and purpose of this book I am more interested in the function of this paradigm in creating change in the Bahai community and in my own life as well as the changes that took place in society, in the Bahai community and in my life in the years 1996 to 2011 whether they had to do with this new cultural paradigm or not. Readers will find that I do this in all sorts of ways. Readers may come to say, after skiming and scaning this work, that I draw too wide an ambit, try to cover too wide a range of material and that I don't focus as sharply as I should on the specifics of this paradigm. And they will be partly right!

Perhaps I should apologize early in this book for what readers may come to see as irrelevant directions for the content. This book has given me, though, an excuse if you like for making all sorts of observations and for taking an intellectual and observational flight in many directions which readers who want to travel with me must inevitably go. Such readers do not have to agree with me; disagreement is healthy if it all takes place in the context of a search for a context in which relevant and fundamental questions may be discussed. For me, this book, is just that: it is a context or, more accurately, a search for a context, for dealing with the immense challenge that is involved with being a member of this great Cause. This book is also part of my attempt to contribute to the resolution of some of the tensions that have arisen in the last decade and a half both outside this paradigm and within the wider Bahai community. Some of my observations are connected directly with the details of the paradigm and some are not. I cast my net wide and many are the fish in the sea that get caught in the net. I hope some readers enjoy the fish dinner that can result for those who have travelled with me through these many paragraphs. But readers, in the end, will have to make their own dinners as I must make mine. In the end, too, no matter how much this Faith has a community focus, it also has an essentially private focus on the individual where all the real battles in our lives are won or lost.

I try to convey some of this private focus which I have experienced and which all Bahais experience in their lives---in the following prose-poem which I wrote at the end of the first decade of the implementation of this new paradigm:

LANDSCAPES AND ELSEWHERES

My poetry has come to be defined by some things, some topics, to such an extent that it is simply unimaginable in any setting outside these subjects, except on the rarest of occasions. The essence of my poetry is so very much associated with this typical, prototypical, subject matter. The particularities, the details, of my poetry's description and definition, result in the construction---in the process of writing my poetry---of a world, a home, a place, a mise en scene, where these topics invariably occupy locations in a physical and intellectual landscape and domain. These subjects appear again and again. For some readers this repetition will be tiresome, I’m sure.

I have made my home, my place of residence, in life in so many places, so many towns and houses where the sense of home did not exist before. It had to be created, recreated, again and again. I always had a mother and a father, or just a mother, or a wife or a wife and children to help in the process. I’m not so sure I’d do a very good job if I was on my own with none of these core elements of identity which most of us carry from cradle to grave. I might have found the task too lonely without these human accompaniments. Life has an immensely routine aspect and many tests and difficulties and most of us are not capable of doing these tasks alone. I will never find out for now in the evening of my life, even if my wife dies, I have three children and three step-grand-children to help provide that identity which keeps many, if not most Bahais, in the large cities of the planet congregating in communities of like-interest: Los Angeles, New York, Sydney, Perth, several cities in Iran where 300,000 Bahais are now found, and on and on goes the litany of urban agglomerations where Bahais can be found in large numbers.

None of us are islands; we all tend towards insularity in some respects. That has been especially true of me since I retired. We also contain multitudes within us. I became very conscious of this internal diversity as the decades advanced in the 50 years before I retired(1949-1999), years filled with high levels of social interaction and movement from place to place. Shakespeare says that we need to be able to people our solitude and know how to feel alone in a crowd. That is what I do now that I am in my sixties. These insularities and these social engagements are, it could be said, the countries of our soul, countries mostly unnamed and unknown. My poetry begins to name, to describe, these unknowns.

We all have, too, what Hugh Kenner calls ‘elsewhere communities’, places we travel to and things we do and think about to find out who we are. The traveler, the pioneer-travel-teacher absorbs this ‘elsewhere community’ into himself to become what defines him throughout life.(1) -Ron Price with thanks to (1)Hugh Kenner, Massey Lecture in Canada, 1997.

I have my own Grand Tour now,(1) my elsewhere community, and my
journey through what I know to
to much that I have yet to know;
and when the war is over I will
go home to the Land of Lights..

(1) In the eighteenth century the Grand Tour was the trip from some place in European civilization through Europe to Italy and Rome. This is no longer the Grand Tour. We all make our own Grand Tour now and this is especially true, from my point of view, in this culture of learning and growth, this new Bahai paradigm.

April 22nd 2006

SOME COVENANT-BREAKERS

If one googled the words "Alternative Perspectives on the Bahá'í Religion" one could get access to a host of views of the Bahai Faith from: (i) x-Bahais, (ii) unenrolled Bahais, (iii) Christian critics, (iv) Muslim critics,(v)Bahai critics, (vi) pre-Guardianship Bahais, (vii) Universalist Bahais, (viii) covenant-breakers, (ix) a variety of Orthodox Bahais, indeed, the list seems to be endless. If I took the list at all seriously I would wonder what had happened to the religion I have belonged to for decades. On close examination, though, and placed in a general context, all of this verbiage is, as Abdul-Baha emphasized, just so much froth at the edge of the ocean, froth that collects on the shore's edge and is here today and gone tomorrow, froth that one does not take seriously but which occupies one attention for a short time or no time at all. The froth may actually be gone tomorrow but it is different froth as a result of different waves of people none of whom have or will have any success in breaking the Covenant into pieces. This ancient term is now endowed with new meaning and it stands at the very centre of what it means to be a Bahai and what our own personal understanding of our place in the unfolding plan of God(NSA of USA, 1988, p.5).

As the fourteenth year of this new paradigm was ending in the early months of 2010, to chose but one of the more curious examples from this confused medley of dreams that constitutes this new world of disgruntled and discontented people with various axes to grind--and who seem on the surface of things to be grinding away with some success--Bahais on the internet were able to read the somewhat surprising phenomenon of an attempt to revive the claims of Mirza Muhammad Ali, the archbreaker of the Covenant after the passing of Bahaullah. These claims have been revived by a group known as the ‘Unitarian Bahai Association’ in order to lend legitimacy to their existence, as what they see as a newly-established sect. This ‘Unitarian Bahai Association’ avows loyalty to Baha’u’llah but rejects the authority that Baha’u’llah gave to Abdu’l-Baha and the Universal House of Justice. These claims have been made on a web site and in postings to discussion groups. These people’s own public statements have already told the part of the world that engages in internet discussions at several sites what they are about.

This group has even arrived recently--in 2010-and been publicising their efforts, their attempt at creating an impression of a divided Cause on facebook. This is a popular internet site, although efforts of this kind tend to get lost in a sea of names and posts. The effort is nothing if not ingenious. Bahais are given an opportunity to demonstrate why the rehabilitation of Muhammad Ali is not a realistic alternative to accepting the authority that Baha’u’llah gave to Abdu’l-Baha to lead the Bahai community. As this new paradigm progresses knowledgeable Bahais are beginning to arise to refute the wild and inaccurate, often unbelieveable claims and opinions of some internet posters.

A man by the name of Neal Chase began to appear in cyberspace in 2001. Neal Chase claimed to be the next Guardian and announced that he had been adopted and appointed by Joseph Pepe who had since died in 1994. The Bahais Under the Provisions of the Covenant(BUPC) accepted Mason Remey's adopted son Joseph Pepe Remey as the third Guardian. Chase claims to be the great-grandson of ‘Abdu’l-Baha. He sees himself as the third President of the Universal House of Justice of Baha’u’llah. He also sees himself as the current Guardian of the Baha’i Faith seated upon the throne of King David which is to last for ever (Psalms 89; Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, page 15). In some ways Chase is merely an extension of the Bahá'ís Under the Provisions of the Covenant (BUPC),a small Bahá'í group of something less than 100 members founded originally by Leland Jensen in the early 1970s. The claims of the BUPC focus on a dispute in leadership following the death of Shoghi Effendi in 1957, and a subsequent dispute among the followers of Mason Remey. As a follower of Remey, Jensen believed that the majority of Bahá'ís were deceived, and attempted to create a new administration.

Jensen also made specific predictions for worldwide catastrophes, including a specific date in 1980 for the apocalypse, where followers were observed by researchers as a study in cognitive dissonance. They noted that from 1980 to 1996 membership fluctuated, but probably never exceeded 200 nationwide, declining significantly during the 1990s. In January 1997 the House of Justice sent a statement to all NSAs entitled "Mason Remey and Those Who Followed Him." The statement was most comprehensive and dealt with the issues surrounding claims involving "the third Guardian." As this new paradigm evolves issues involving the covenant will continue to raise their heads as they have done since the inception of the Cause in the 1860s and since the ealiest years of the Babi Faith in the 1840s. The institutions of this Faith will continue to respond as they did in the first years of this new culture of learning---to maintain the unity of the Cause which has been its major achievement in the first two centuries of its existence.

These are samples of some of the developments within this new paradigm. Most Bahais find such discussions singularly unattractive and are, indeed, discouraged from participating in them at all. But again, as Abdul-Baha has stated, we should not be alarmed by this foam on the waters edge in the ocean of the Cause. The defence of the Cause in the context of covenant breaking has always been left in the hands of certain appointed Bahais before this new paradigm. This is still largely the case. In this new paradigm, though, the writings of covenant-breakers can be easily read on the internet. Although they attract hardly any Bahais, seasoned or novitiate, veterans or newly enrolled, they are a presence that is part of the backdrop of this new Bahai culture in the last 15 years.

Many intellectual issues have come to the fore in the last fifteen years in addition to new variations in the long saga of covenant-breaking. One, for example, is infallibility. It is a complex term in Bahá'í scripture that has not been much discussed in Bahá'í secondary literature. The concept, which has analogies in Catholicism and Islam, is historically burdened, as Udo Schaefer notes and has become obsolete in secular thought. Schaefer's paper on the subject in the journal Bahai Studies Review(1999) analyses two categories of infallibility: essential infallibility which is inherent in the messengers of God, and conferred infallibility, which is a characteristic of the institutions of the Guardianship and the Universal House of Justice. His paper focuses on the Universal House of Justice. Does the House of Justice's infallibility operate to an unlimited extent? Are every one of its decisions infallible and, if not, what are the boundaries of that infallibility? The possible and immanent limits of this charisma of office and infallibility are analysed and a detailed argument provided that supports a defensible restrictive interpretation.

In the critical discourse on the nature of infallibility, the discussion of these immanent limits of conferred infallibility is of crucial significance, Schaefer states. The idea that the Universal House of Justice is invested with unlimited infallibility leads to untenable and unacceptable consequences for some Bahais. Unfortunately, experience has shown that in the Bahá'í community a critical discussion on this subject is not an easy thing since the convictions of many Bahais are simply too strong. Bahá'u'lláh's assurance that: "Whatever they decide is of God," as valid for absolutely every kind of decision, implies to many that the Bahá'í community is in possession of a kind of oracle that can be consulted and from whom the community gets infallible guidance in all matters. To the secular world in which Bahais must live and have their being, a world in which religion is seen by millions as irrelevant, this concept poses a serious intellectual dilemma. And there are other serious dilemmas which this book raises.

Indeed, there are many other issues which have come into the world of discussion in internet circles where some of the members of the Cause read a great deal. The only way to avoid being exposed to some of the more intense, divisive and intellectually challenging of the intellectual clashes on the internet is to stay off the sites where such dialogue is found. Just don't go there and, when you do, don't participate in the discussions where liberal and conservative temperaments engage in their punative and not-so-punative-rebuttals. The air is often filled from left and right on the emotional and psychological spectrum with strong language, grievances and emotionally loaded dialogue. Generally, for many if not most Bahais, it is better to stick one's head in the sand so to speak, stay on the fence and not confront issues about which participants really have to: (a) know a great deal and/or (b) be a good writer----in order to "play the game," as it were. Of course, one is not compelled to go to these internet sites, to read and to engage in this internet dialogue. In this new paradigm, though, there are a host of strange bedfellows, as they say, inhabiting the interstices of cyberspace.

As I say in this book, it is only a relatively small handful that do take part in this endless casuistry, endless lance and parry, and the "I am right and you are wrong" game which we sometimes call debate, dialogue, discussion or interchange. Perhaps the word game is too pejorative a term. It may be, as one prominent historian put it not so long ago that: "the day of the theologian has finally arrived." Not many have ever wanted to be theologians, not that many in the sum total of people in a community. Those who do want to be theologians should not call themselves Bahai theologians. I dont call myself a Bahai poet but, rather, a poet who happens to be a Bahai. My words possess no authority and I do not try to steer readers into waters which by their nature are intended to question the House of Justice. If I have a question that I want some authoritative answer for, I write to that Supreme Body or one of the many institutions of this Cause.

There are many issues in public life in which it is better to stay on the fence, avoid the discussion and, as I say, put one's head somewhere else: in the sand or one of many other more comfortable and useful places. The world is overflowing with issues both inside and outside the Cause and what issues a person takes on is highly personal, idiosyncratic and reflects a person's own areas of knowledge and interest, what is happening locally in their Bahai community as well as in the wider world at the time.

THIS BOOK TRIES TO BRIDGE THE GAP

This book is an attempt to bridge the gap between the many polarized and contending views as well as between the erudite and the ordinary man, those who read extensively, the serious students of this Faith and the average non-erudite fellow who prefers gardening and watching TV, who may live in the world of text messages, short print passages and the local newspaper--whose reading level is not very high or, if it is high, he or she is not academically inclined and really has no expertise in some of the more critical subjects required for participation in many of the discussions. I am not the only person trying to bridge this gap. Many, if not most, simply are unable to engage in many of the complex literary exchanges and participate in the often highly complex game of discussing intricate historical, psychological and community problems. That, of course, is not a new thing. I stick my neck out as I have been doing for decades, but only occasionally and only when I think I can make a useful, a positive and constructive contribution. Many times this is not possible and silence is the best response. There are many issues about which I simply do not know enough and, given the plethora of issues in the world, I confine myself to a select few.

One of the reasons I do a great deal of writing both on the internet and in books is that I don't have to go to work in the morning or raise kids any more. I am on a pension; I don't like gardening; I have few manual skills; I watch little TV; I like to write and I don't have to go to many meetings any more. So it is that playing the game of words, for it is a game, so to speak, is a challenge, but, again, only to an extent. Sometimes the game feels like a war after one has gone back and forth in dialogue for hours on the internet. We all have our limits when it comes to writing and talking on serious issues. I often tire of the dialogue or even with friends after about two hours maximum. then I have a cup of coffee, a snack, go to bed and wait to live another day.

On the internet one can go forever, hopping from site to site, discussion to discussion, thread to thread, twisting and turning over a myriad issues. After playing on the internet at many a discussion site I tire and sometimes I go elsewhere and work on writing books or doing research for my writing. I leave the internet and its never-ending chats and discussions about 'what to do Alfie?' or 'what's it all about Alfie?'or the 'deep-and-meaningfuls,'DMs as some people call such discussions. The internet provides people like me with plenty of opportunity when I want to throw the literary ball around so to speak. I offer to readers one man's views, one man's experience, one man's integrative, hopefully unific, views--and I do so at some length in very personal ways in books like this. One is never completely successful in these casuistical discussions or when writing a book. There are always people with plenty of advice to give you. I have already been criticized in many ways for being far too personal, too focussed on my own experience, but that is one of my main aims. This book is not unlike my life, a work in progress. And, as in life so on the internet one can only win some of the time, only appeal to a coterie of readers.

I wrote the following piece for myself and others to help in dealing with criticism that often arises in internet threads. Much, indeed, the far greatest part, of my teaching and consolidation work in the Bahai community in the years of this new paradigm has been on the internet and it has had nothing to do with the wrangling between various sub-groups of believers. Anyone who plays an active part in internet discussions, an active part that includes writing and replying to the writings, the posts, of others, must learn to deal with incoming criticism without escalating the conflict. Those who do engage in extensive internet writing activity need to: like writing, be good at facilitating, possess a brilliant inventiveness and a strong dose of humility. I do what I can; it's a challenge; teaching the Cause has always been a challenge whether one writes in its defence or talks about it to others.
>br> If aspiring internet participants, those who engage in a dialogue that is more than conventional one-liners, more than a kind of 'hey-there here I am' mentality with endless use of colloquialisms and even the occasional invective--if such participants do not possess goodly portions of the literary and personality skills I refer to, they will simply be unable to continue with the dialogue. They will find themselves getting upset and upsetting others. In the end they will withdraw to save their sanity, their emotions, their very skin. For the waters in cyberspace can be hot and heavy. In the last dozen years I have received my share of internet invective from those who "C" and "F" their way through discussions, from those who have a low tolerance for people's idiosyncrasies--and, when writing, idiosyncasies are often more apparent. There are many on the net who simply take delight in 'taking-the-mickey,' as they say Downunder. I have written the post which follows on the subject of criticism as one of several examples of a response to help both me and others with the criticism that is a common variable, an extensive presence, in cyberspace. I have posted this piece at many an internet site when the dialogue between the participants got hot and heavy....sometimes my remarks were useful and sometimes they weren't.

THOUGHTS ON THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS

Preamble:

The first criticism of my writing, at least the criticism that I remember, was in 1950 when I was in grade one in the then small southern Ontario town of Burlington, a part of what is still called the Golden Horseshoe. It’s jammed right at the left-hand end of Lake Ontario. I’m sure I received criticism of my writing in the three years before that from my family members and playmates, perhaps as early as 1947 when I was three or four and colouring or printing my first words on paper, but I have no memories of that incoming criticism, no memories until, as I say, 1950. That was more than 60 years ago(1950 to 2010).

Early in this new, this third, millennium, in 2004 to be precise, I began to receive written criticism of my prose and poetry on the internet. I had received criticism, mostly verbal, of my published writing from 1974 to 2004 during which time I was able to get some 150 essays published in newspapers and magazines in Australia. Writing had become, by the 1970s, a more central focus to my life, much more central than it had ever been, although it had always been central in one way or another at least, as I say above, since 1950. When one is a student receiving criticism of what one writes is part of the core of the educational process. Sometimes that criticism is fair and helpful; sometimes it is unkind and destructive.

Being on the receiving end of criticism on the internet has been, in some ways, just a continuation of that half-century(1950-2000) of comments on what I wrote. The internet is full of lumpen bully-boys who prowl the blogosphere. There are the hysterical secularists who proliferate among that immense commentariat. There are the dogmatic Islamists and Christian fundamentalists who try to impose their interpretation of the Quran or the Bible on the rest of the Muslim or Christian communities, respectively. My experience on the internet, as I say, was just a continuation of the decades of criticism I had already received. Writers, as F. Scott Fitzgerald says so succinctly over dinner in a film of his last years, Last Call, must get used to criticism. It’s part of the air they breath if they are going to be out in the public domain.

Literary tyrants, people who are going to tell you where, when, why and how you have gone wrong in no uncertain terms, without mincing their words or pulling any punches, without what you might call an etiquette of expression and tact, have always come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. One must learn to deal with them in one way or another as their criticisms come your way in the daily round. There are many MOs, modus operandi, to use a term from the who-dun-its, in dealing with the harsh and not so harsh words of others. Of course, it is not only writers who have to deal with critical tongues and words in many forms. A vast literature now abounds on how to deal with this reality of life.

The reactions to criticism of their work of two famous writers are discussed below in this 3300 word essay because their reactions throw light onto my own way of dealing with this inevitable reality of existence if one is, as I am, a writer, a poet, a man of words, a writer of belles-lettres, a belletrist. For many writers the term belles lettres is used in the sense to identify literary works that do not fall easily into the major categories such as fiction, poetry or drama. Much of my writing has become, in the last twenty-five years, 1985 to 2010, a hybrid that does not really fit comfortably into the major categories of writing.

And so it is that after more than sixty years of having to deal with the phenomenon of critical feedback of my written work I pause here to reflect on the incoming criticism of what I have written and what I now write drawing, as I say, on the experience of two other writers in the last century, writers of fame and much success.

LAURA RIDING

In 1936, right at the start of the Baha’i teaching Plan, a Plan in which I have been myself engaged in a host of ways during the last fifty years(1959-2010), the American poet Laura Riding(1901-1991) wrote to a correspondent: "I believe that misconceptions about oneself which one does not correct, but where it is possible to correct, act as a bad magic.” That bad magic has been at work on the reputation of Laura Riding for many years, for well over 70 years.

One of the criticisms levelled at her in her later life, and repeated recently by the renowned literary critic Dr. Helen Vendler, was that she "spent a great deal of time writing tenacious and extensive letters to anyone who, in her view, had misrepresented some aspect, no matter how minute, of her life or writing." Vendler found Riding, somewhat predictably, "more than a little monomaniacal,” in relation to criticism of her work. It is true that despite advanced age and failing health, Riding continued her vigorous and valiant, one might even say, fanatical attempt to halt the spread of misconceptions about herself and her writing to the very end of her life. But the "bad magic" was too powerful to be overcome. Incidentally, this view of criticism that Riding held, the view that it was “bad magic," was held by a woman who was also accused of being a witch and of exercising a literary witchcraft by some of her zealous critics.

Why was Riding so scrupulous in her attempts to correct misconceptions of her life and writing no matter how minute? It was, partly at least, because she recognized the importance of details to the understanding of human character. "The details of human nature are never a matter of infinitesimals," she wrote in an essay published in 1974. "Every last component of the human course of things is a true fraction of the personal world, reflecting a little its general character." She, like many other writers and non-writers it should be added, never welcome criticism. Some react to the slightest criticism like a cornered wildcat and others like a barking dog.

My approach to incoming criticism is more diverse than Riding’s, not as consistently intense and defensive, not as sensitive to infinitesimals, not like that wildcat or that barking dog. Sometimes I ignore the comment; sometimes I am tenacious and write an extensive response; sometimes I write something brief and to the point. Sometimes I deal with the comment with some attempt at humour, sarcasm and wit, if I can locate these clever sorts of written repartee in my intellectual and sensory emporium. I certainly agree with Riding that we should not be judged by some infinitesimals, but it is difficult when one writes extensively in the public domain not to be judged by all sorts of things of which infinitesimals are but one of the many.

THE INTERNET

After seven years from 2004 to 2012 of keeping some of the written and critical feedback sent to me by readers on the internet, I must conclude that, thusfar, the negative feedback hardly amounts to much that is of any significance, at least to me. This is not to say that this criticism has not been useful. Most of the feedback has to do with my participation at various websites, participation that was negatively viewed. My posts were seen, when viewed in a negative light, as: too long, not appropriate, raising the hackles of some readers because they were seen as irrelevant, boring, inter alia. I thought this personal statement here, this brief overview, analysis and comment, would be a useful summary of both the incoming criticism I have received in the last six years and my views on that criticism.

Some people on the internet let you know, as I have already indicated above, in no uncertain terms what they think of your posts. Frankness, candour, invective, harsh criticism, indeed, criticism in virtually every conceivable form, can be found in the interstices of cyberspace, if one writes as much as I do at more than 6000 locations among the 260 million sites and 4.6 billion subjects, topics or items of information at last count, that are now in existence in that world of cyberspace. In the last six years I have been on the receiving end of everything imaginable that someone can say negatively about someone’s writing and someone. This negative feedback has been, as I say, useful and I have tried to respond in ways that improve readers’ opinions of my work and, sometimes, of me. Sometimes I am successful in these efforts of explanation, of self-justification, of defence, and sometimes I am not. Such are the perils of extensive writing and human interaction; indeed, such are the perils of living unless one is a hermit and does one’s own plumbing and electrical work, never goes shopping and relies only on the products of one’s garden for food.

ISAIAH BERLIN AND IVAN TURGENEV

To draw now on a second writer and how he dealt with criticism, I introduce Sir Isaiah Berlin(1909-1997). He was a leading political philosopher and historian of ideas. In a lecture he gave in 1970 on the Russian poet Ivan Turgenev, Berlin pointed out that this famous Russian writer altered, modified and tried to please everyone in some of his works. As a result, one of the characters in his books “suffered several transformations in successive drafts, up and down the moral scale as this or that friend or consultant reported their impressions.” Berlin went on to say in that same lecture that Turgenev was inflicted by intellectual wounds as a result of the criticism of his works by others, wounds that festered by varying degrees of intensity, depending of course on the nature of the criticism, for the rest of Turgenev’s life.

Turgenev was attacked by writers and critics of many persuasions on the Left and the Right of the political spectrum in those days when these terms left and right had more clear and understandable demarcations. This Russian writer possessed, Berlin noted, what some have called “a capacity for rendering the very multiplicity of inter-penetrating human perspectives that shade imperceptibly into each other, nuances of character and behaviour, motives and attitudes, undistorted by moral passion.” Turgenev, like Riding, could never bear the wounds he received from incoming criticism of his writing in silence. He shook and shivered under the ceaseless criticisms to which he exposed himself, so Berlin informs us.

THE PROCESS OF BAHÁ'Í REVIEW

After more than sixty years(1949-2011), then, of having my writing poured over by others; after nearly fifty years(1964-2011) of having my writing reviewed before its publication by Baha’i reviewing committees at national and local levels of Baha’i administration and its institutions and even by some individuals and groups at the Bahá'í World Centre in Haifa Israel; after trying to write in a way that would please various groups of people both within the Baha’i community and without by committees, colleagues, professors, tutors, students and teachers at a multitude of educational institutions---before my writing saw the light of day in some publication or school-handout, I came to enjoy writing on the internet.

The National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of Australia Inc, the nationally elected body by the Bahá'í community in Australia does not require writers like myself to have their writing reviewed before it goes onto the internet. The Review Office of the NSA of the Baha’is of the USA has given me permission to post my works on the internet, although they have advised that further review is necessary if I want to place my writing in book form, in a hard or soft cover, for general and public consumption. In some ways though, given the fact that writers who are Bahais can place their pieces of whatever length on the net, the process of review has become far less the issue that it once was. If a writer is keen is just goes to sites and cuts-and-pastes his works at these places. Readers download the writing and no review, no publisher, is involved at all. Such is the new world of cyberspace and, I might add by extension the new Bahai culture in the last 15 years. Of course, I am not talking about the explicit Bahai culture of study circles and Ruhi books, institute activities and devotional meetings, but the mise en scene, the milieux, the socio- technological world that has shifted immensely during the years of this new paradigm, the years since the mid-1990s and that is the backdrop to this new Bahai culture.

BACK TO THE INTERNET

Pleasing others, of course, is still important but, for me, there is a new found freedom of expression that the internet provides. Part of this freedom is due to the advantages and pleasures of age. Now in the early evening of my life, these middle years(65 to 75) of late adulthood as human development theorists refer to the period in the lifespan from 60 to 80, with jobs and the many employment positions far behind me, no one checks what I write before it goes into the light of cyberspace. My own editing pen is kept busy and I can edit as much or as little as I desire. I do get feedback and I read everything I can get my hands on, so to speak, this helps provide a synoptic view, a very from different angles, a wide-angled view, of the topic of the new Bahai culture. This helps provide a steroscopic vision of the subject, a vision not obtainable from a single pair of eyes and one mind. Eventually, though, I take a synthesized line of my own and must live with that line until yet another revision occurs. The internet provides writers like me the opportunity for endless revision.

Editing has never been one of my favorite activities and I tend to rush this part of the writing job, at least initially. I then revise, alter, subtract, add, delete and edit in a multitude of ways as a result of incoming comments, both encomium and opprobrium. Sometimes I make no changes at all to my initial internet post. In the case of a book,this book, the changes seem endless. The editing of this book went on day after day in 2007 and 2008 as it was taking form and, from 2009 to 2011, the editing has been periodic.

After my writing gets onto the world-wide-web it is ignored, criticized, diagnosed, interpreted, subjected to hair-splittings and logic choppings by readers, posters, moderators and administrators at internet sites. I am on the receiving end of invective and negative appraisals, accusation and berating, blame and blasphemy, castigation and censure, condemnation and contumely, denunciation and diatribe, epithet and obloquy, philippic and reproach, revilement and sarcasm, scurrility and tirade, tongue-lashing and vilification. I am given more advice than I receive at home from those I love and who love me and more than I ever got as a student and teacher. This happens not so much in relation to this book but in relation to many of my posts at various internet site on a host of topics.

I am viewed as tactless, insensitive, awfully boring and told where to get off, where to go, where to go for further writing courses to help me in my literary vocation and avocation and why I should discontinue the practice of writing entirely. I am also told what a wonderful inspiration my writing is. Compliments, flattery and praise abound. These words of encomium and opprobrium that I receive, as I say, are really not much different than; indeed, are much the same as, the words many other writers get when their words are found between hard and soft covers. Even the writings of Shakespeare, the Bible and other major works in the western tradition get great buckets of criticism poured on them from the generations which have come on the scene since the post-world-war-2 years, those now 65 and under, to chose a convenient timeframe for most of the incoming criticism I receive.

Most of those who have come to inhabit the parts of the WWW where I post say are the Y-generation. They were born between the mid-1970s to the first years of the 2000s. These generation Y people are today's teens, 20s and 30s, the millennial generation, the net generation. Some say that generation X are those born between 1974 and 1980. The fine-tuning of these labels gets a bit complex. The first generation on the internet, the years 1990 to 2010, have a wide range of personality constructs which would need a separate statement to discuss in sufficient detail.

DEALING WITH CRITICISM: AN ANSWERING THEOLOGY

Critical scholarly contributions or criticism raised in public or private discussions should not necessarily be equated with hostility. Questions are perfectly legitimate, indeed, necessary aspects of a person's search for an answer to an intellectual conundrum. Paul Tillich, that great Protestant theologian of the 20th century, once expressed the view that apologetics was an "answering theology."-Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, U. of Chicago, 1967, Vol.1, p6.

I have always been attracted to the founder of the Bahai Faith's exhortations in discussion to "speak with words as mild as milk," with "the utmost lenience and forbearance." This form of dialogue, its obvious etiquette of expression and the acute exercise of judgement involved, is difficult for most people when their position is under attack from people who are more articulate, better read and better at arguing both their own position and the position of those engaged in the written criticism than they are. I am also aware that, in cases of rude or hostile attack, rebuttal with a harsher tone, the punitive rebuttal, may well be justified, although I prefer humour, irony and even gentle sarcasm rather than hostile written attack in any form. Still, it does not help an apologist to belong to those "watchmen" whom the prophet Isaiah calls "dumb dogs that cannot bark."(Isaiah, 56:10)

In its essence criticism is often just another form of confrontation, an act of revealing one's true colours, of hoisting the flag, of demonstrating the essential characteristics of one's faith, of one's thought, of one's emotional and intellectual stance in life. “Dialogue does not mean self-denial,” wrote Hans Kung, arguably the greatest of Catholic apologists. The standard of public discussion of controversial topics should be sensitive to what is said and how; it should be sensitive to manner, mode, style, tone and volume. Tact is also essential. Not everything that we know should always be disclosed; not everything that can be disclosed it timely or suited to the ears of the hearer. To put this another way, we don't want all our dirty laundry out on our front lawn for all to see or our secrets blasted over the radio and TV. Perhaps a moderate confessionalism is best here, if confession is required at all—and in today’s print and electronic media it seems unavoidable. Much of internet dialogue, though, is far, far, below standards of even a reasonable literacy as posters “f,” “c” and “s” their way through discussions with the briefest of phraseology, a succinctness that approaches sheer nothingness and an inarticulateness that has more in common with grunts and sighs as well as whimpers and whims and betrays a basic knowledge based on visual media and little reading.

My findings, my views, rooted as they are in many places, in many philosophical positions or fields: subjectivity, relativism and pragmatism, can be verified only by individuals capable of assuming and willing to assume my point of view. The illiterate person, to choose an example of someone who is not capable of assuming my point of view unless, of course, someone reads to him or her, is not capable of assuming my point of view. There are many who are not willing. This is true in all scientific endeavour: in the physical and biological sciences, in the social sciences and in the various studies in the humanities of which religion is but one of these many fields. One can be convinced of the truth of something, have a sense of certitude and know little to nothing at all about the object. Faithful self-abandonment is sometimes more valuable than cerebral consent and sometimes it is not. Ideally, it seems to me, the full engagement of the rational faculty is essential down life's long path and one abandons reason at one's risk. But the full engagement of one's emotions is also essential to help provide motivation, a get-up-and-go and the necessary enthusiasm without which much of life's activity is a dry bone-yard. And emotions, however fully engaged, are often untrustworthy and cause immense inner turmoil.

This is true in many fields beside religion in the journey of life from cradle to grave. Society and the millions of individuals in it are caught in heated cross-fires between noncommitment, skepticism, cynicism and defensiveness on the one hand and varying degrees of the upholding of categorical imperatives, of the justifying of arbitrary absolutes, the insistence on finality and complete agreement, irrational commitment and aggressiveness on the other. This cross-fire results in many deaths, spiritual, intellectual and social. It also results in dialogue, in a type of apologetics in which there is a fundamental discrepancy between the respective fields of thought, Bahai thought and the thought of those in other interest groups. In some ways, the gulf is unbridgeable. This the case between much secular thought and much thought in the Christian or Islamic religion or, for that matter, between variants of Christianity or even within what are often the muddy and pluralistic waters of secular thought itself.

This is the general climate in which much apologetics takes place in our world with its interdependence of diverse points of view, with passionate expressions and proofs all lying along linking lines and lines that cannot be and never will be linked. The world has become very complex for the votaries of its multitudinous faith positions.

Critical scholarly contributions or criticism raised in public or private discussions, an obvious part of apologetics, should not necessarily be equated with hostility. Questions are perfectly legitimate, indeed, necessary aspects of a person's search for an answer to an intellectual conundrum. Paul Tillich, that great Protestant theologian of the 20th century, once expressed the view that apologetics was an "answering theology."(Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, U. of Chicago, 1967, Vol.1, p6.) I have always been attracted to the founder of the Bahai Faith's exhortations in discussion to "speak with words as mild as milk," with "the utmost lenience and forbearance." This form of dialogue, its obvious etiquette of expression and the acute exercise of judgement involved, is difficult for most people when their position is under attack from people who are more articulate, better read and better at arguing both their own position and the position of those engaged in the written criticism than they are. I am also aware that, in cases of rude or hostile attack, rebuttal with a harsher tone, the punitive rebuttal, may well be justified, although I prefer humour, irony and even gentle sarcasm rather than hostile written attack in any form. Still, it does not help an apologist to belong to those "watchmen" whom the prophet Isaiah calls "dumb dogs that cannot bark."(Isaiah, 56:10)

In its essence apologetics is a kind of confrontation, an act of revealing one's true colours, of hoisting the flag, of demonstrating the essential characteristics of one's faith, of one's thought, of one's emotional and intellectual stance in life. “Dialogue does not mean self-denial,” wrote the famous, and for some infamous, Hans Kung, arguably the greatest of contemporary Catholic apologists. The standard of public discussion on controversial topics should be sensitive to what is said and how; it should be sensitive to manner, mode, style, tone and volume. Tact is also essential. Not everything that we know should always be disclosed; not everything that can be disclosed it timely or suited to the ears of the hearer. To put this another way, we don't want all our dirty laundry out on our front lawn for all to see or our secrets blasted over the radio and TV. Perhaps a moderate tone and mode, a moderate manner and confessionalism is best here, if confession is required at all—and in today’s print and electronic media it seems unavoidable.

I make all these comments about criticism and apologetics at the outset of this book in some ways to get them out of the way. I have felt the need to deal with them even if many readers who come to this book do not feel the need. As I say above, one of the chief aims in my writing of this book is for the clarification of my own thoughts and the elaboration of my own role in this new paradigm so that I can answer the question: how do I fit into the new Bahai culture of learning and growth--not if I fit in.

BOOKS WRITTEN ABOUT THIS PARADIGM

Books discussing the nature of this paradigm have also begun to appear like Paul Lample's Creating A New Mind(Palabra, 1999) and Revelation and Social Reality(Palabra, 2009). Both these books contain excellent overviews of this new culture of learning and growth as well as reflections on the individual, the institutions and the community. In future editions of my own book, in the next two Five Year Plans, 2011-2016 and 2016-2021, I hope to provide a good bibliography on the subject of this new Bahai culture. A great number of internet sites now explore the developments in these last 15 years and readers of this book are encouraged to google to their hearts' and minds' content the many aspects of what is written about this new Bahai culture in that world of cyberspace. Indeed, what you could call a new transnational community feeling has been created on the internet among its participants in these last 15 years, years synchronizing with the emergence of this new Bahai culture. This world-wide-web is a seedbed for diverging and often controversial, stimulating and informative discussions.

The worldwide web also has sites where utterly inadequate perspectives and discourse on Baha’i doctrines and activities are found. Anyone who surfs about in cyberspace comes across an international dialogue among hundreds of thousands of the millions of Bahais and internet users around the world. There is a rich world available for potential internet users, a world in which everyone who wants to can take part in some way or another in writing. Users of the world-wide-web can just read what others write. Alternatively, of course, individuals are free not to go to any sites at all. It is not a requirement to click onto the internet and play around in cyberspace. There are dangers lurking in the interstices of cyberspace for the would-be student of the Cause. Be warned: all is not enrichment and relevant reading. There are many twists and turns and casuistical discussions if one wants to venture into the complex labyrinths of words on a myriad of subjects. There is enough to keep the minds of the best of the students of the Cause fully engaged in questions which believers have often never considered before and, if considered, are not thought through and, if thought through, require a good deal of back-and-forthing as subjects are often pursued by many to the very nth degree and often beyond the knowledge of the would-be reader or student of the Cause.

Readers with a tendency towards a fundamentalist pose, a pose with its roots in the oldest traditions of scholarship and priestcraft, may find themselves confronted with material that is highly objectionable to their sensibilities, highly contentious and outright violations of their spiritual and religious susceptibilities. I trust this is not the case with my book. I do not aim to be objectionable but, when writing as in talking, one does not win them all. My book is, it seems to me, a sanctimonious exploration of many a theme and also a self-questioning of my life and my community, my society and much else--especially my assumptions and those of others. I use the word sanctimonious in the sense of adulatory, flattering, and to some extent openly pious and even moralistic. Readers should not see what they read here as an expression, though, of some fixed or final point of view. I try to polish ideas not finish them. Along the way I thank Bahiyyih Nakhjavani for her stimulating approach to Bahai dialogue as outlined in her book: Asking Questions: A Challenge To Fundamentalism(George Ronald 1990). I, like this fine Bahai writer, seek creative solutions and I am often disturbed by fundamentalist attitudes and dogmatic assertions, what is often referred to as the "I am right you are wrong" attitude.

One of Nakhjavani's main points in her novel Saddlebags is that we are all locked irrevocably in the trappings of our lives, just as soundly and thoroughly as our brains are locked within the bone-prisons of our skulls, and she uses her considerable novelistic skills to prove this. It's not only difficult, she suggests, but totally impossible to perceive the dynamic of another person's life, or even the so-called "evidence" of the "objective" outside world. Nakhjavani has written three novels during this new Bahai paradigm and they have much to say to each of us as we travel though the paths of this new culture of learning that the Cause is now establishing in these first two decades of its implementation: 1996 to 2016.

The dogmatism that this novelist, this writer whom I first read back in the early 1980s, is an attitude I have to watch, not only in others but also in myself. Rigid attitudes, narrowness of vision and unrelieved intolerance toward the points of view of others I deal with in a host of ways in this book--but mostly through style and indirectness rather than confrontation. I also try to maintain an attitude that hopefully enables ordinary people not to become divorced from the creative Word, a divorce often based on a patriarchal mystique that has existed around learning and scholarship for centuries. It is easy to mistake religious habit, routine and community regularities and rhythms for spiritual actions and attitudes. In this paradigm Bahais need to try to recognize this difference, for it is more than some superficial reality. They (and I) need to apply their understandings of the gap, the division, in these two inner and outer attitudes and actions and learn from this understanding. It is a slow process but it is crucial if their Bahai communities are to become models of the kind of society that attracts others.

We need to stay away from what could be called “conservative-everything-by-the-book rigidity” and “loosey goosey liberalism” where ‘everything is OK.’ Overall, I call such behavior an engagement in “Baha’i ideological partisanship” and we need to be warned to stay away from it.

There are many questions in relation to this paradigm and many shadow areas and zones of contradiction and paradox where these questions arise. To be a student of the Cause is to be a person who has the courage to question the half-light in which we all dwell. Often we assume this Cause is offering answers when, in reality, what it is doing is helping us to pose the right questions. Questions often have little to do with doubt and answers are not always about certitude. This book is aimed at creating an openness of mind, a humility of response and a readiness of apprehension that finds resolution rather than--or in addition to--solutions.

This is a book which, like its author, aims to rest as easily with the enigmas of paradox and contradiction as with the pleasures of peace and consistency. Nakhjavani emphasizes succinctly that history is full of the wrong questions being asked and search in the wrong places for the wrong things. The complexity of our world requires much more than simplistic responses and an air of triumphalism. As the House of Justice put some of this problem in its Ridvan 2010 message: "While conveying enthusiasm about their beliefs, the friends should guard against projecting an air of triumphalism, hardly appropriate among themselves, much less in other circumstances. Hopefully this paradigm and this book will help in the process of getting some, if not large, sections of the Bahai community to ask the right questions and asking these questions soon enough to aid in humanity's survival and in limiting the suffering that has already drenched its billions in a veil of tears. Questions themselves are a form of answer and often no answer is complete unless it carries the seeds of another question. And suffering itself unless it is faced heroically and triumphed over often means very little. "Man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor."--Dr. Alexis Carrel

There is a catechizing tradition of question and answer through which religious instruction is derived and it is useful to compare this tradition with what we find in Bahai history. There is no assumption, as catechism requires, of set answers, of questions tailored towards a specific doctrinal response from which the mind may not deviate. To many the Ruhi books appear to be part of this catechizing tradition. But it all depends on how the tutors and teachers utilize the materials. Filling in the spaces with written responses does not necessarily imply fixed answers. There are often, if not usually, many responses that can fill the lines of the spaces in the questions in the Ruhi sequence of books. There often appears to be a repetitive element in catechizing, with answers that are closed, that aims to teach and learn by rote and this, it seems to me, is antithetical to the spirit of independent investigation of the Cause. Many of what are so often called the Bahai principles can only be pinned down in practice by the spawning of a thousand questions which will send us scurrying into apparently unrelated areas of concern. Generally, we need to question ourselves and the writings and everything else we experience and read. We are not dealing in this new paradigm with a mere code of laws and words on paper to be regurgitated at exam-time. We are not dealing with the idle repetition of the endless facts of Bahai history and this Faith's mountain of teachings. Not every tutor on the planet, like not every teacher in every school, has a flexible orientation. Some tutors have fixed approaches but blaming the curriculum is usually not the answer.

The latest statistics of internet users posits two billion of the planet's seven billion people. Of the approximately six million Bahais I would guesstimate no more than a million are actively involved in internet reading, far fewer in actual dialogue and interchange at the many internet sites and, of these few, only a small handful are engaged in that endless analysis and casuistry, hairsplitting and criticism as well as experiencing the anxious concern and worry to which I have referred above. A book could be written about this new paradigm and not refer at all, as I have done above, to cyberspace and not deal with the criticisms that have surfaced in the first decade and a half of the paradigm's existence. But, again, as I say, this is a quite personal book, a quite personal perspective, reflecting as it does much of my own teaching efforts in the last fifteen years.

This book has behind it a certain driving power, a certain inspiration, a certain literary proclivity that has resulted in my dealing with the twists and turns of life and especially twists and turns on the internet. That driving power and inspiration has taken this book in directions which many readers would not have gone if they were to examine this new Bahai paradigm and their role in it. Readers will have to work out their own stories, their own roles in this paradigm. My receptivity and curiosity, my Bahai dreams and visions lie behind this book. Without the fire of this unabating curiosity, without the kindling of the undying glow of seeking to understand--which has been with me for decades as a Bahai--this book would never have developed. Irresistably beckoning me onward, urging me to press forward into new worlds was Time's winged chariot and its hurrying clatter. This book has been an intellectual lure and I sometimes feel as if I have not captured its quarry. But my energies have been running at full stretch at least from time to time between meals, TV programs, conversations and sleep among other quotidian activities. I have felt a sense of urgency pushing me onward and this book is the result of that running and that urgency.

THE INTERNET: GLOBALISM AND LOCALISM

The new culture of learning and growth in the Bahai community has, as part of its mise en scene: the chatter, the glitter and tinsel, the immense literary pool of words, the technological wonder, the brilliant new tool that is the internet. This is true in many parts of the Bahai world, in many of the 200++ territories in which this Cause is nowfound. This world wide web brings to those who are interested, to those who can read, to those who have access to this technology, the finest thoughts and ideas in the history of civilization and the worst, the garbage, the detritus of our post-industrial, post-modern age. That is the internet. As Shoghi Effendi wrote over half a century ago: "A mechanism of world inter-communication will be devised, embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvellous swiftness and perfect regularity." And so it does; it brings into the visual fields, for those who so desire and who have the technology, the criticism and praise of this new paradigm from virtually anyone with the interest in putting their fingers on their computer keyboard and composing their thoughts for a sector of the world's peoples who have access to this marvellous mechanism. For at least two or three million Bahais, though, the internet is not partof their culture, their social and community experience.

A new Bahai culture had already emerged by the passing of the Founder of the Bahai Faith, Bahaullah, in 1892. More than a century after His passing, indeed, nearly 120 years, the Bahai community is concerned not with the birth of that culture but with its growth and development. There are now in existence several histories which deal with this incredible growth and development. that is not the purpose of this book except en passant and indirectly.

All of this cyberworld is as much a part of this new paradigm for a small but significant slice of the Bahai community as the bread and butter on their table--or so I would argue--although this cyberworld is obviously not an explicit part of the paradigmatic framework itself as defined by the House of Justice and the International Teaching Centre, institutions that set the initial structure and skeleton, the schema and fabric, as well as developing and refining its application in the last decade and a half. The food on our table and the air we breath, among perhaps millions of other aspects of our physical environment are, like cyberspace, to put the idea more accurately, part of the context in which this new paradigm operates. For this new paradigm is set in a social, a historical, a sociological, a psychological, an economic, a contemporary context that must be factored into any analysis and comment on this new Bahai culture. And the individual Bahais, you and I, are merely sojourners, pilgrims, travellers for a time in this culture.

The virtual globalization of the planet, the crystallization of its unity, has been stimulated many-fold during this paradigm in ways that are often obscure and unbeknownst to the world's inhabitants who do battle with the phantoms of a wrongly informed imagination. Ill-equipped to interpret the social commotion at play, millions listen to the pundits of error and sink deeper into a slough of despond, troubled by forecasts of doom. The commotion, that slough of despond and the crystallization of the planet's unity, will continue apace in the decades ahead as these things took place and continued apace in the decades before this paradigm in previous Bahai paradigms which I discuss briefly in this book, in the pages ahead.

The Internet has become an important tool capable of spreading a complex message to a large audience. Religious movements like the Bahai Faith are a growing social force that employs modern communication criteria. There has been an extensive convergence between religious communication and the Internet. Although sociologists and anthropologists among others have studied religion, this topic is not particularly relevant to communication studies. Marketing, which involves communication issues, deals with religion in other contexts, like the influence religion exercises on consumer behaviour and decision-making processes. However the communication of religious ideas is not dealt with since it is not linked to consumption.

During the years of this new paradigm, in the economic, social and political worlds, vast changes have been taking place; indeed, many of them are themselves paradigmatic shifts in several of the global cultural domains. But this book does not focus on this immense and complex wider world and its systems. Science and electronic technology has made it possible to connect with individuals across the planet while simultaneously providing users with a world of information. People are now able to mask or reconfigure their own identities into online persona. The overall result of globalizing influences is to cultivate an overwhelming sense of human anxiety regarding “placelessness.” To put this a little differently, individuals are faced with identity issues. The inability to forge identity based on a sense of local or regional belonging is, for many a new problem and often not a recognized one. According to one writer: "This anxiety makes the human subject long for a diversity of places, that is, a difference-of-place that has been lost in a worldwide monoculture. This is not just a matter of nostalgia. An active desire for the particularity of place, for what is truly “local” or “regional,” is aroused by such increasingly common experiences. Place brings with it the very elements sheared off in the planiformity of site: identity, character, nuance, history. The issue is too complex to deal with here in all its ramifications.(John Casey, The Fate of Place: a Philosophical History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997, p.xiii)

Arguably one of the consequences of this globalism is an emphasis on localism. In cluster after cluster among both the Bahai and non-Bahai populations around the world entertainment and varied cultural installations, agricultural and commercial shows as well as arts and sports festivals are springing-up with increasing abundance. They all tend to have certain common messages. Their intent is to promote ideas about cultural celebration and collective unity among the region's inhabitants. The events occur in sites that are specially constructed for the dissemination of these life-giving and unific messages and, as such, serve as a space for discourse among the different cultural groups and as a transmitter of officially sanctioned ideas by local authorities. They also serve as representations of a location as a differentiated place, establishing and upholding their uniqueness among places for the benefit of an audience that lives within and outside their borders. Events of celebration: olympics, international games of all kinds, electronic media and cinema awards of many kinds, the list of these celebratory activities goes on and on. Some of these events have become an increasing part of the outreach by Bahai communities around the world. To put all this in a different way, the whole world has become a vast tourist experience and fun house and every locality which can is cashing in on the abundance. Of course, at the other end of the spectrum of human experience is despair, destruction and tragedy which whip-up the emotions of human kind as millions concern themselves with the tempest of chaos and confusion that blows with increasing fury year after year. All of this provides the mise-en-scene of the new Bahai paradigm.

The world wide web could be seen as an extension of the abundance I refer to above and an opportunity for people to express their concerns for the plethroa of tragedies in the world. The new Bahai culture of learning is immersed in this vast sea of cultural possibilities, a sea in which the international Bahai community is swimming with a fertile and vibrant new life. This new life can be seen in clusters, LSAs, registered and unregistered groups, localities, regional councils, NSAs and a whole panoply and pageantry of Bahai agencies and administrative bodies around the world. This is not happening everywhere, of course. The picture is mixed and incredibly diverse in its manifestations. But, as the House point out as recently as its 2010 Ridvan message regarding the strengthening of the culture of learning: "learning is the mode of operation,a mode that fosters the informed participation of more and more people in a unified effort to apply Bahaullah's teachings to the construction of a divine civilization."

As the American philosopher John Dewey once wrote: "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself." This new Bahai culture of learning and education, it could also be said, is life itself. It is, again as the House noted on 21 April 2010 part of "the evolution in collective consciousness." But as Dewey also emphasized in his lengthy discussion of education: "The routine of custom tends to deaden even scientific inquiry; it stands in the way of discovery and of the active scientific worker. For discovery and inquiry are synonymous as an occupation. Science is a pursuit, not a coming into possession of the immutable; new theories as points of view are more prized than discoveries that quantitatively increase the store on hand."(Reconstruction in Philosophy) I will let readers unpack this fascinating quotation and apply it to this new Bahai paradigm.

Just as Christianity spread using the Roman road system and the immense apparatus of Roman civilization which conquered the European world in the centuries just before and after the appearance of Christ, the Bahai community and its administrative order has spread in the present and previous paradigms due to the spread of print and electronic media: magazines and journals, newspapers and radio, recording equipment and musical technology, television and the internet, indeed, a cornucopia of advancements in science and technology. With the internet this Cause has gone to virtually every corner of the world, at least those corners which were hooked into this globalizing technology. And this has happened in the years of this new paradigm: 1996-2010. Of course, like most generalizations, there are exceptions and the picture, as I say, is not a simple one as I may be implying here by these broad brush stokes of analysis.

Like the Roman road system and Rome's civilization which were crucial to the spread of Christianity, modern technolgy and Western civilization have been crucial to the spread of the Bahai Faith. Rome's civilization was complex and historians like Edward Gibbon and Arnold Toynbee, among others, have attempted extensive analyses of the often subtle and intricate relationships between the new and growing religion of Christ and and the crimes, the follies and the misfortunes of mankind in those early centuries of the eventual triumph of Christianity over Greco-Roman culture. Western civilization, which as Toynbee argues has become synonymous with global civilization, and its scientific and especially communications technology is the cultural milieux in which the Bahai Faith is emerging as the religion for mankind. This paradigm is but one of the important embryonic stages in that development.

Some 15 countries have no internet access or they restrict it. Very poor people, of which there are millions and billions have no access. Arguably some three-quarters of the world's population is still unconnected. Nevertheless, the Cause has spread immensely due to this new technology and there is a strong, a pervasive Bahai presence on the net and its two billion users. This new apparatus involves new techniques and new techniques involve a new spirit. The computer, the world-wide-web, has injected a new spirit into our age. For some it is a miracle and a wonder. For others it has little to no value at best and is a nuisance at worst. It is impossible to summarize all the experience and the lessons learned in the first 15 years of internet teaching or in the vast global institute process, the new culture of learning and growth. This book provides a broad survey and a personal context. I try to strike a balance between personal experience and opinion on the one hand and clinical, factual developments on the other. Some may find my perspectives too personal. If I have any justification for this personal approach it is that: this book is an attempt to answer the question "where do I fit into this new paradigm?" It is a question each of us must answer for ourselves.

The Internet has become a very powerful means of communication through which not only information, but emotions and empathy, are exchanged, and where socialization occurs. Following a purely information stage, when people surfed the ’net just to seek information, today people go online to seek other people, to socialize within virtual communities, thus adding a social dimension that may be considered even more relevant than the informational one. Once a cold medium, the Internet has become a hot medium, in the sense that emotions and feelings can be experienced and communicated online. Therefore, even religious communication, which is an intense emotional experience, is at home in this new medium. Religious movements were pioneers in adopting new media to spread their beliefs and thoughts. This has also been true of the Internet. Since religious communication deals with abstract concepts, involves profound sentiments and can have specific and difficult goals such as converting people, it differs radically from business communication. At the same time, it can be studied as a benchmark in order to obtain insights for other types of communication and to explore the potential of web-based communication. Religious communication via the web is quite lively and can elicit strong reactions. So strong that some religious websites has been forced to close their forums and chat rooms due to the excessive fighting that sometimes emerged among the participants. The religious communication via the web can be so intense that it often takes on forms of blessing, virtual prayers and pilgrimage.

This book and its analysis is designed for use not ostentation and I trust it contains multiple layers of insinuation, innuendo and hidden meaning. For history and sociology, psychology and philosophy, in the end, have no meaning, only that which we each give it in our inevitable subjectivity. Total objectivity is never achieved, an impossible position. I offer readers options and hold my own judgements, at least some of them, in suspense. We are all dramatis personae who are never able to fully fathom, control and command events in this or any paradigm. We are caught in an endless succession of engagements, engagements which are our lives. Diligence and accuracy are important merits and useful skills that I try to bring to this literary exercise. I am more than a little conscious of my incapacities in both these departments of intellectual virtue. Character in the end, is so-often associated with an unstable entity, a complex life-narrative. Character is only partly explainable in a person only partly understandable. This is true of my life which I know better than anything and it is true, a fortiori, of other individuals and this paradigm which I have come to participate in as well as to study and read about in these past 15 years.

Still, the implications of the Bahai Revelation increase when study and service are joined and carried out concurrently, when efforts are made to translate the Bahai teachings into reality. The new Bahai paradigm involves an ethos and a worldview which comes to be understood in greater measure as that same study and service continue with the years. The worldview of the members of a group is, “the picture they have of the way things in sheer actuality are, their most comprehensive ideas of order.” Their ethos reflects “the tone, character, and quality of their life, its moral and aesthetic style and mood." To put it crudely and perhaps too simply, the worldview of this paradigm provides the “is” component of the Bahai experience of this paradigm.

We all live and die, and along the way we are subject to certain intractable patterns within nature and our society. Yet certain “moods and motivations,” with their accompanying moral impulses that supply our ethos and our worldview, resist that ethos and worldview. The result is a continuous, a perpetual “is/ought” struggle and dialectic. A religious ritual, a routine and a set of practices resolves this tension by integrating one’s ethos and worldview into a harmonious whole, into consistent patterns of action, but only to an extent. This is beccause we are notperfect and we only ever partially understand that ethos and worldview. Religious activity, our activity in this paradigm, tunes human actions to an envisaged cosmic order and projects images of cosmic order onto the plane of experience, our experience. Our everyday experience, then, is drawn-up into a larger whole. While all of this is going on the sheer incomprehensibility of the metaphysical world is always with us. We keep trying to translate our beliefs and language into actions.

The new Bahai paradigm defies a simple definition that would aid the casual observer in his effort to grasp its broad landscape. Upon entering the paradigm believers find themselves pulled in a variety of directions—all under the aegis of institutional guidance, patterns of Bahai community activity and a host of individual interpretations. In the end each Bahai must resolve the pulls and pushes in the name of action and, hopefully, some consistent pattern of action and centres of consistent activity. Each Bahai finds for themselves a rhythm of activity which gradually emerges that is highly diverse so that it is not the rhythm of a single foot as one critic of authoritarian regimes put one of the problems of control and order in community life. That I have given great emphasis to the internet in the above paragraphs is part of my take, as they say these days, on this paradigm. Clearly, though, the world wide web is just part of the background to the paradigm, as is family life, television, radio and a host of other features of our culture. They are not the paradigm itself. My writing about it tells more about me as the author of this book than it tells about the paradigm.

THE BIG PICTURE OF ALL THE 16,000 CLUSTERS AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Of the 16,000 clusters across the Bahai world 10000 were still unopened in 2006, as I mentioned above, and of the other 6000 only two per cent of them are capable of sustaining any significant growth(See Paul Lample, Reason and Revelation, 2009) Lample wrote this in his book "Revelation and Social Reality"in Palabra Pub. 2009). Now six years later, in January 2012, there are many more than 1600 IPGs. Go to this link for a useful essay on IPGs by Dr. Farzam Arbab:http://bahai-library.com/talks/arbab.2001.html I do not try to keep track of the IPGs. This means that of the 6000 clusters which are opened to the Cause in 2006, 25% of them are capable of sustained growth. To put this another way: of the 16,000 clusters in the world--1600 have IPGs or 10% of all the clusters on the planet. Another reliable source has stated that: of the 250 total territories and countries in the world(yahoo), 150 of them have at least one IPG and 100 have no IPGs.

One of the major quantitative goals of the Five Year Plan(2011 to 2016) is to have some degree of growth in 5000 clusters by April 2016. To place these IPGs in a context of the vast global urbanization allow me to add the following. Cities have undergone "macrocephalic" growth to the point where they burst at the seams—not so much with opportunity and differentiation, but desperation and sameness. UN HABITAT estimates that a billion people reside in slum conditions, a figure expected to double in the next three decades. In 1950, only London and New York were big enough cities to qualify as megalopolises. By 1970, there were 11 such places, with 33 projected for 2015. The fifteen biggest cities in 1950 accounted for 82.5 million people; in 1970 the aggregate was 140.2 million; and in 1990, 189.6 million. Four hundred cities today have more than a million occupants, and 37 have between 8 and 26 million (García Canclini 1999, 74; Scott 1998, 49; Dogan 2004, 347). Almost 50% of the world's population lived in cities in 2000, up from 30% in 1960. In fact more people are urban dwellers today than were alive in 1960; and for the first time in world history, more people now live in cities than rural areas. Most of the remainder are desperately poor peasants (Davis 2004, 5; Observatoire de la Finance and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research 2003, 19; Amin 2003). Across Latin America, for instance, 70% of people moved from the country to the city in the four decades from the mid-20th century, with Mexico City growing from 1.6 million residents in 1940 to 19–29 million today, depending on which figures you consult (Martín-Barbero 2003, 40; García Canclini 2001, 13). The emergence of capitalism in China is another key instance. It had 293 cities in 1978. Today it has 640. These changes are reactions to economic, military, and social polices, such as neoliberal economics' insistence on agricultural trade over subsistence, military planning, and corporate domination over local concerns. In India, as many as 55 million people may have been displaced from agricultural life because of dams constructed in the name of development: the Green Revolution dispatched surplus workers away from rural disappointment and towards urban hope (Castles and Miller 2003, 3; Roy 2004; Davis 2004, 10, 7).

In the post-1989 epoch, crises of cognitive mapping—where am I and how do I get to where I want to be?—have been added to by crises of ideological mapping—who are we and what do we stand for? (UN HABITAT 2003; Martín-Barbero 2000, 336). No wonder Mexico City's people live with the heavily ironic motto "La Ciudad de Esperanza"—the city of hope. They go there for a better material existence. In doing so, they lose the familiarity and security of the everyday in a world that sometimes appears to be "rushing backwards to the age of Dickens" (Davis 2004, 11).

Not all is dark and dreary, though. The internet, to chose one example of immense technological and social communication, is giving access to this new Faith to people in many of those 16,000 clusters and territories with no IPGs, at least to those who are interested and possess this new technology--perhaps one quarter of humanity as I say above--with an easy access to information about this new Faith. This fact, this feature of the technological and communication backdrop to this new paradigm, cannot be appreciated too highly. Approximately thirty per cent of the globe now has this cyberspace access and the implications this has for the spread of the new Bahai culture is staggering. Even though some 8000 clusters have no Bahais and only a small percentage are capable of sustaining significant growth as I write this paragraph at the beginning of 2012, the internet is providing millions of people with easy access to information about the Cause, if they are interested.

There is a great deal more than urbanization that is the backdrop to this new Bahai culture. The Bahai culture which has been developing since the passing of Bahaullah, under the guidance of His legitimate successors in the last twelve decades,1892-2012, has been developing as Western civilization has been sweeping the face of the Earth with its industrialism and post-industrialism, with its global wars and globalization, with its science and technology, with its many transforming influences, too many to site here and too complex to describe in even the most summary fashion in a book like this. But it is also a civilization that is moribund, broken down and in a decline which must end in a fall unless the downward movement can be arrested. As the English writer and populist historian, H. G. Wells argued more than a century ago, this Western civilization is rushing down a steep place to the sea. This is one of the essential contexts within which the Bahai culture has been operating for more than a century. This same civilization also has many integrating features; all is not lost and all is not bleak; again the picture is complex. this paradigm and this world wide web are part of this complex picture.

The progress which the Bahai community calls growth is a cumulative one and its cumulative character is apparent in both its outward and its inward aspect. Indeed, the entire process is part of a growing civilization: the growth of a Bahai civilization and that civilization of which the Bahai Faith is but a part--and at this stage a very small part. The Cause has, in recent decades, become an expansive movement which is both easy and difficult to observe in quantitative and qualitative terms. The wider-world has become in the lifetime of the Central Figures of this Cause, and its trustees in the first century of its Formative Age, one single human society embracing all the habitable lands and navigable seas on the face of the planet. What some call this Western Civilization has washed round the coasts of all other civilizations; it has encircled their frontiers, knocked at their gates, broken through their defences and forced an entrance into their inmost citadels.

This very Homo Occidentalis mistrusts its own elan and this very uncertainty has ominous symptoms of social disintegration which are everywhere apparent. The very growth and expansion of this Western Civilization is beset by both external challenges and inward ones of self-articulation & self-determination. These challenges contain moral and spiritual questions of immense magnitude. The new Bahai culture of learning and growth, this new Bahai paradigm, is set within this wider global context. It is hardly surprising that this paradigm presents to the believers its own challenges of immense magnitude. The Cause has always presented its votaries with staggering challenges, immense personal tests as well as spiritual rewards, rewards not dissimilar to those provided by the great religions throughout history. The Bahai Cause is at the very core of the evolutionary thrust on the planet and working within its new paradigm provides those who can see the wisdom of its complex structure the very raison d'etre of their activities in daily life. At least that is one way of expressing the nature and reality of this paradigm.

Of course, what makes the Bahai Cause so victorious is not so much the lives and examples of its individual believers but, rather, the convincing evidence of the doctrines themselves and the ruling providence of its great Author. Still the lives of the Bahai martyrs in Iran cannot but excite the wonder and curiosity of the West and the East.

What Karl Marx wrote about human anatomy, namely, that it contains a key to the anatomy of the ape, and that the intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, can be understood only after the higher development is already known. Our modern world thus supplies the key to the ancient. The true character of each epoch comes alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? (Marx, Grundrisse, London, Pelican Books, 1973, p. 105, and 111) This, it seems to me, is just as true of the Bahá'í epochs. Bahá'í history exercises an eternal charm and meaning, metaphor and value to the meaning of this current paradigm.

WHERE DO I FIT IN?

This paradigm and this Western-global Civilization is, then, the context in which each individual Self or Personality rests. I have capitalized these two words, Self and Personality to give emphasis to the primary focus in this book. It is a focus which attempts to answer the question: "where do I fit into this new paradigm?" I also try to answer the related questions: "where has this paradigm been and where is it going?" I answer these questions for myself, give hints to readers and leave readers to work out their own responses, their own form of participation, as they are and have been doing in the last decade and a half and will do in the decades ahead. Each single human being in the Bahai community is part and parcel of an organic whole. Bahai primary and secondary literature is awash in organic analogies and like individual cells, the basic functional unit of life, the individuals all over the Bahai world respond to the inner structure of their needs, wants, meanings, purposes, personal cirumstances and their environment with its many features: community, socio-historical context and its needs and circumstances.

The cell is the smallest unit of life that is classified as a living thing, and it is often called the basic building block of life. The individual in the Bahai commuity is the essential part of what Shoghi Effendi used to call the warp and weft of the Bahai community. Some organisms, such as most bacteria, are unicellular and consist of a single cell. Other organisms, such as humans, are multicellular. Humans have about 100 trillion or 10 to the 14th cells. A typical cell size is 10 µm; a typical cell mass is 1 nanogram. The largest cells are about 135 µm in the anterior horn in the spinal cord while granule cells in the cerebellum, the smallest, can be some 4 µm and the longest cell can reach from the toe to the lower brain stem. One could describe the variation in human beings as I have described here the variation of cells, but I simply wanted to elaborate here on the nature of the cell. I leave it to readers to draw their own analogies between cells and individuals. Organic analogies are potentially alive with parallels to individual and community life.

The wider organic whole for the Bahai is the civilization he or she is helping to advance each in their own way. This civilization was born through the awakening of the mighty soul of Bahaullah which came to flower in Iranian soil. The relation of the individual Bahai to the whole is in the form of mechanisms called institutions both Bahai institutions and a multitude of other societal institutions. The activities of each Bahai exist in a field, a framework, a paradigm, a new paradigm now 15 years in the making. I encourage readers to become familiar with what the House of Justice, in its Ridvan message of 2010, referred to as "the crucial developments that have occurred over the past decade in that aspect of Bahai culture which pertains to deepening." The long-cherished goal of universal participation is much more within reach in the context of this new Bahai culture. The sacred duty of each believer in many ways is the same as it always has been: to diffuse among his friends and relations what he sees as the inestimable blessing which he has himself already received.

In the broadest of senses, at least philosophically and abstractly, we are each a part of, that is, we exist in everything that we perceive--at least so goes one strain of thought in the literature of the humanities; but, as Bahais, we are also part of a new race of men, a new spiritual species which have evolved from a former and temporary state of quiescence into a lifelong bout of dynamic activity, activity which seeks, among other things, to draw men toward a Cause. It is for this purpose, among others, that each Bahai was created and has come into the world. This was true for the Christian as it says in John xii, 32 and xvi, 28 and it has been, is and will be true for the Bahai. It is true in this paradigm and it was true in all previous Bahai paradigms.

We as Bahais are virtually commanded to put our essence into life and action in order to be, to become, what we potentially are. Our field of action lies within this new paradigm which lies in a community, a society which is the common ground between our individual fields of action and those fields of action of a host of others; and it is here that the necessity, the obligation, the duty of our lives, translates itself into many things among which is an external pressure, a pressure to both transform ourselves and others. The transformation takes place in a social context. This transformation is not inevitable nor is it, often, observable. The changes required of us are resisted by inertia, indifference and sometimes by active hostility. Often the necessary changes do not take place because of our lack of understanding or our unwillingness. The reasons for our lack of change, our transformation, are legion. So many dangerous temptations lurk in ambush to surprise the ungarded believer and assail him. He must engage in a persistent and strenuous warfare against his own instincts and natural inclinations; he must try to safeguard himself from the trivialities of the world without and the pitfalls of the self within.(Shoghi Effendi, Bahai Administration, p.140.)

The Bahai community, inspite of the weaknesses of its individual members, provides the very Salt of the Earth through its devotion and of living the life for remote and mighty ends. Each Bahai is overwhelmingly outnumbered by society's mass, by its great majority, although he or she may enjoy the companionship of a few kindred spirits. In this new paradigm there is an anticipated kindling of belief from soul to soul and this must be done by a combination of sheer mimesis, of drill or of inspiration, of strenuous intellectual communion and intimate personal intercourse or of all these factors. The process is at once mysterious and complex, direct and simple and, it would seem after the observation of over a century and a half of experience, it is a process that is characterized by an endless movement from the world of contemplation and solitude, of prayer and meditation, of reading and study---to the world of action by the individuals and the communities concerned. Conversation and interaction enriches the understanding but prayer and meditation, solitude and silence are the major school of learning and the cultural attainments of the mind.

Each individual must work out for themselves, both inside and outside the paradigm, their own combination of social interaction on the one hand and solitude and silence on the other. Each of the individual misfortunes and merits, the often transitory and sometimes decades-long experience, the events of the life-narratives as they come into play each day must be transmuted by the collirium which is knowledge and understanding, wisdom and intellect. These are the two most luminous lights in the world of creation, and they must be transmuted into acts of engagement as our daily life takes its course--sensibly and insensibly. The dross of egotism and animus needs to be refined away within the limits of our incapacity as we exercise this engagement in the multitude of ways that is our lives. The public misfortune, the global disasters of our age, our epochs, are so catastrophic in the wider world in which we are enmeshed that each person must find their personal form of identification with the pubic sphere, its disasters and its slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. May we all find a part to play and may we each appreciate the contribution of others.(UHJ, 6/12/08)

As we "grunt and sweat," as Shakespeare puts it so graphically in a famous soliloquy, under what is often, but thankfully not always, a weary life, we must act--or lose in our lives "the name of action." We each need to possess a sense of our own nothingness, or our own private spiritual malaise on the one hand and a sense of the transforming affects of the indwelling God on the other. There is also much else that we need: many other emotions and thoughts inbetween and these thoughts and emotions need to possess an intensity that moves us beyond the passive state, a state inculcated by much that is the backdrop of our civilization, our contemporary society. The result of this concern for humanity is a great many different things to a great many different people: from a sting of the conscience, to a sense of guilt, to the exercise of gregarious inclinations, to the sheer joy in activity--to each person a constellation of different emotions, thoughts and activities. The result of that constellation is a degree of participation in this new paradigm which is different for each Bahai and ranges from total obsession on the part of some of the believers with the paradigm to total indifference and non-engagement. "Humanity is weary for want of a pattern of life," the House of Justice emphasizes, "to which to aspire."(Rivan 2012) That pattern is part of the goal of this new paradigm.

Readers need to exercise caution, it hardly goes without saying, when evaluating the experience and views of people like myself. These views do not necessarily represent truth or comprehensiveness. Empathy and the ability to use words are not the same as understanding and, even when they are, they are still only one person's views and they do not possess any authority, at least not in the Bahai Faith. Relying on what believers say about themselves and their religion is not enough; it is only a start to a long process. Readers need supplemental information from the ocean of words in order to enlarge their own understanding. Readers need a great deal to make things clearer than they were before reading someone's views and after reading those words. If readers are to correct erroneous information they need to be continuous, life-long, scholars of the Cause. Even then there are no guarantees. The process is not like "the five easy payments" and "guaranteed or your money back."

The famous existentialist John Paul Sartre stated: 'We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal to be what others have made of us.' Whether it is in discussions about the legitimacy of one's moral behaviour which others seek to impute as immoral; whether it is in the suppression of reasoned criticism and principled critiques of various kinds which others attempt to engage in to put down our views; whether it is in the oblique and unacknowledged imposition and enforcement of religious orthodoxy at the expense of inclusion, diversity and integrity; Bahai apologists and the Bahai community in general need to be aware that arrogance in the expression of one's views enters easily into the heart of discourse, of apologetics. What we each make of the views of others may not always be entirely correct. The use and command of language is the fruit of exercise and, in its written form, that exercise, is done well by only a few--and even when it is done well, especially when it is done well--it is intended to predispose readers in favour of a particular interpretation of history, of our times or, indeed, of whatever the writer is on about. The game is complex; the stakes are high and the exercise is not like the simplicities of poker or the subtlties of cricket or golf.

EDITING, MANNER, TONE, AND HUMOUR IN THIS WORK

At this stage in the evolution of this work I could benefit from the assistance of one, Rob Cowley, affectionately known in publishing circles back in the seventies and early eighties --as “the Boston slasher.” Guy Murchie, a noted Bahai writer, Chicago Tribune photographer, staff artist and reporter (1907-1997) regarded Cowley's work as “constructive and deeply sensitive editing.” If he could amputate several dozen pages of this book and take his editing pen across my pages with minimal agony to my emotional equipment I’m sure readers would be the beneficiaries. But alas, Bob is dead. He died right at the outset of this new paradigm. I did find two editors, a copy and proofreader, though, who did not slash and burn my pages and paragraphs but left my soul quite intact as they waded through my labyrinthine chapters and pages, smoothed them all out and excised undesirable elements. But both of these men tired of the process and for various reasons were no longer accessible by the time I had this book in reasonable shape but in need of an editor over a year ago in early 2009.

John Kenneth Galbraith had some helpful comments for writers like myself. Galbraith’s first editor Henry Luce, the founder of Time Magazine, was an ace at helping a writer avoid excess. Galbraith saw this capacity to be succinct as a basic part of good writing. Galbraith also emphasized the music of the words and the need to go through many drafts. I've always admired Galbraith, a man who has only recently passed away. I’ve followed his advice on the need to go through endless drafts. I’ve lost count, but I’m not sure if, in the process, I have avoided excess. I can hear readers say: “are you kidding?” In some ways I have found that the more drafts I do, the more I had to say. And excess, is one of the qualities of my life, if I may begin the confessional aspect of this work in a minor key.

And so I have Galbraith watching over my shoulder and his mentor, Henry Luce, as well. Galbraith spent his last years in a nursing home before he passed away in 2006 at the age of 98. Perhaps his spirit will live on in my writing as an expression of my appreciation for his work, if nothing else. Spontaneity did begin to come into my work at perhaps the first draft of the third edition. This work is now in its third year of writing and in the first eight months of this third year it has gone through at least six drafts. Galbraith says that artificiality enters the text because of this. I think he is right; part of this artificiality is the same as that which one senses in life itself. Galbraith also observed with considerable accuracy, in discussing the role of a columnist, that such a man or woman is obliged by the nature of their trade to find significance three times a week in events of absolutely no consequence. I trust that the nature of my work here will not result in my being obliged to find significance where there is none. I’m not optimistic. Perhaps I should simply say “no comment” and avoid the inevitable gassy emissions that are part of the world of writing. I do hope to do much more personal editing of this work for it is in need of people like that Boston Slasher.

The capacity to entertain and be clever may not occupy such an important place in the literary landscape in the centuries ahead. But this is hard to say. There is something wrong it seems to me if millions have what the famous American critic Gore Vidal says is part of the nightly experience of western man: the pumping of laughing gas into lounge rooms. While this pumping takes place millions, nay billions, now and over the recent four epochs about which this account is written, starve, are malnourished and are traumatized in a multitude of ways. The backdrop to this book is bewilderingly complex. Still, I like to think readers will find here a song of intellectual gladness and, if not a song, then at least a few brief melodies. I would also like it if this work possessed an unwearying tribute to the muse of comedy that instils the life and work of writers like, say, Clive James and many another writer with the flare for humour. Alas, that talent is not mine to place before readers, at least I am not conscious of its presence. Readers will be lucky to get a modicum of laughs, as I’ve said, in the 420 pages that are here. I avoid humour, although not consciously, except for the occasional piece of irony, play with words or gentle sarcasm that some call the lowest form of wit.

Not making use of the lighter side of life, not laughing at oneself and others in a country like Australia or America is perhaps an unwise policy. I do this a great deal in my daily life but readers won’t find much to laugh at here. They will find irony in mild amounts and even enough of that Benthamite psychology of the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain to satisfy the value-systems of readers, at least in Australia and America. I came to write this work as I say above, after living for more than three decades in Australia. Part of this book unavoidably analyses the things, the culture, around me, for this new paradigm is immersed in a global culture that can not be separated from the Bahai culture of learning and growth that this book seeks to explore.

In some ways I don’t mind the relative dearth of humour in this work. If that fine American essayist and critic Gore Vidal was right in a recent interview when he said with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek where he often places it to the pleasure and amusement, the annoyance and frustration of many a listener--and laughing gas is, indeed, pumped into most homes every night as society amuses itself to death, then, to avoid humour's paradox, its ambiguity and complexity at the heart of our world, my world, seems fitting in this serious text and analysis. I do not want to deny the pain, the tempest of trial and suffering, that is at the very heart of our existence in this age. To gainsay such pain is, for some, a central crime of the bourgeois part of our society. For me, the issues and offences, the challenges and struggles in relation to this polarity-paradox, this conundrum, are exceedingly complex and I only deal with them briefly and indirectly here in this somewhat personal statement, however long it may be.

If readers miss the lighter, the more humorous, touch in this long essay, they may also miss the succinctness that they find in their local paper, a doco on TV or the pervasive advertising medium that drenches us all in its brevity and sometimes clever play on words and images. One thing this book is not is succinct and I apologize to readers before they get going if, indeed, dear readers, you get going at all with this work. I like to think, though, that readers will find here two sorts of good narrative, the kind that moves by its macroscopic energy and the kind that moves by its microscopic clarity. I won’t promise this to readers at the outset in these prefatory words, but such is my hope—springing eternally as hope does and must, at least for me, as I write about the/my Bahai experience in the last 15 years in the font of life casting an eye as I go along to the earlier phaes of my life and those of the Bahai Faith and iuts history going back, arguably, more than two centuries.

My curiosity, as I mentioned above, has been stimulated for many a long year through being tormented by longings to understand, by being racked by unfulfilled ambition to understand on many fronts. Some divine wind of curiosity's unflagging inspiration has generated higher activities, has caused my mind to rise to higher flights in order to make something of my learning, to add something to my society, to increase the quantum of my own virtue. After fifty years of being first a student and then a teacher, I have been able during this paradigm to contribute something to the common knowledge of my community. That is a crucial element, motivation, behind my writing and the part I play in this paradigm.

I have long felt as if I was, as Plato put it, "like a light caught from a leaping flame." In my case it has been the flame of a new Revelation in which I was caught up in as a youth. My role in this paradigm is an expression of this light and this flame. It is also the result of a generalist's knowledge. I play my part not as someone who has a special knowledge of any one of the physical and biological sciences or the humanities and social sciences. I play the role of a generalist in which there are always many 'pastures new,' as Milton referred to the fields of learning. I have grown fonder of life in late middle age and the early years of my late adulthood after years of having to suffer ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ As far as laughs are concerned, I have made much ‘ha ha,’ as Voltaire called it, in the public domain in these last six decades, especially since coming to Australia in 1971, 40 years ago. A goodly portion of my life has been light and cheery and I’m confident, with that American literary critic Gore Vidal, that it will stay this way, barring calamity or trauma, until my last breath.

I hope some readers will enjoy this narrative and analysis in all its excess, its voluminosity and its serious note and tone. In one of John Steinbeck’s letters he wrote: “Anyone who says he doesn’t like a pat on the back is either untruthful or a fool.” Perhaps Steinbeck never met many of the Aussies I’ve known who don’t like pats on their backs or anywhere else, are suspicious of those who give them and are certainly not fools. But I am, alas, not a full-blood Aussie; I am at best a hybrid and I look forward to many pats on the back, if and when they come my way. Australians have taught me not to be too optimistic, too dependent, too attached to such pats; perhaps, though, it is simply life, my experience and my own particular brand of skepticism that has taught me this.

SOME OF MY FIRST WORDS IN THIS BOOK

I wrote a short essay on the subject of the new Bahai paradigm in the southern hemisphere's spring of 2007 and extended that essay for the Online Journal of Baha’i Studies in 2008. It was a journal which appeared, some said, to be ahead of its time. The journal was not sustainable for various reasons and was closed at its website in early 2009. I hope that in this autumn of 2011, at least the autumn in the southern hemisphere, what has become a book of 420 pages will serve readers as a useful extension of their own reflections and understandings regarding this culture of learning and of growth. "Our success," wrote the Universal House of Justice on 10 January 2009, "depends upon the extent to which a more profound understanding of the dynamics of the Plan can permeate the entire community."

May our understanding of this most recent paradigmatic shift in the execution of this Plan and in the life of the Baha’i community--a shift this community is currently going through and has been going through since the mid-1990s--increase in the Five Year Plan that is on the horizon(21/4/11-21/4/16). May that understanding go on to increase in depth in the years ahead as the first century of the Formative Age draws to a close in 2021 after the two Five Year Plans, 2011-2016 and 2016-2021, are completed in the next decade. May all the developments examined in this new paradigm, as the House of Justice concluded its 8,000 word Ridvan 2010 message, be "an expression of universal love achieved through the power of the Holy Spirit." "Undeterred by divisive social constructs," the House of Justice concluded that most detailed message, we were encouraged to "press on...."

The Five Year Plan of 2011 to 2016, unlike the current Plan of 2005 to 2011, will not likely focus to anything like the same extent on numerical goals and their IPGs. There will be, in all probability, a greater focus on the Baha’is moving deeper into the life of society, which means more emphasis on social discourse and social action. Another anticipated feature of the next Five Year Plan, as one noted Bahai writer put it, may be capacity-building in ‘weaker’ countries, so that they become stronger. In the same way that the 10-year Crusade brought many souls into the Faith in the 1960s after the long period of pioneering and the extension of the Cause to the four corners of the Earth and the consequent development with the Baha’i community in the years 1953-1963, the hard work that has been put into the past 15 years will yield limitless possibilities for the next 10 years: 2011 to 2021--the end of the first century of the Formative Age.

The impulse to ponder and to try to distil the events that took place in the Bahai community in those fin de siecle years, that are taking and will take place in the first two decades of this new millennium(2001-2010) and (2011-2020)--indeed as I write--has led to this book. The balance of my writing has been tipped towards analysis and away from narrative and, for some readers especially those who prefer narrative, this will result in a partial loss of equilibrium and meaning. The sheer variety and diversity of these last two decades make it difficult to arrange this book in some simple order of events.

You have, it goes without saying dear reader, the freedom to disagree with the tone, the texture, the content, the thrust, indeed, whatever points you desire to disagree with--as you travel on this brief journey of 190,000 words in this book and its 420 pages. For this book is simply a man speaking for himself. As the Roman poet Terence put it: quot homines, tot sententia. Each man must speak for himself. I do this with a little help, much help, from the words of others. Isaac Newton once wrote: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"(Letter to Robert Hooke). I do not see any further than others, but this work has certainly benefited from standing on the shoulders of many other writers, pouring over their books, articles and internet posts and synthesizing understandings which would never have come my way without them, without their shoulders and their minds.

I have had the happiness that comes from having an aim in life, a raison d'etre, a vocation, a calling from God as it says in the Acts of the Apostles to "feel after Him and find Him."(The Bible, Acts, xvii,27). Bahaullah has written that: "Whomsoever Thou willest Thou caused to draw nigh unto the Most Great Ocean and on whomsoever Thou desirest Thou conferrest the honour of recognizing Thy Most Ancient Name."(Bahai Prayers, USA, 1985, p.120) I have certainly drawn nigh but the degree and the extent of the nearness that I have achieved will remain a mystery before I go into a hole for those who speak no more, as the Bab put it so graphically in one of the passages of His voluminous writings.

This book is part of a larger vision, an angle of vision--dim and partial--of God revealing Himself in action to souls that were sincerely seeking Him through His Manifestation in the person of Bahaullah. Bahaullah was and is a Person Whom Bahais regard as the most wondrous soul ever to exist on the Earth. But my vision, like everyone's, of Him and the Cause He established is but a piecemeal one in the ever-rolling stream of time at its varying pace and unpredictable path. This vision, this sense of human destiny, is expressed here in the context of a new paradigm in the Bahai community. This vision is part and parcel of the community within which I have lived my life and in which this book finds its place.

Some creative stirring, some spark, of curiosity regarding this new paradigm has resulted in what are now quite familiar and even impressive developments in both my own mind and the minds of millions in the Bahai community around the world in over 200 countries and territories. The developments in this paradigm in these last 15 years, 1996-2010, are described and analysed in these 420 pages. This curiosity is, at least for me and as I say above, but a small part of what has been an undying glow of curiosity in my life regarding this new Faith since at least the 1950s. My burning zeal to widen and deepen my knowledge of this Faith has not always been steady and has often been interrupted by the changes and chances, the tests and trials, of life and their sometimes quite demoralizing effects. Indeed, on one or two occasions the fire nearly went out.

The play of my instincts and natural inclinations, my inability to subordinate my personal likings to the imperative requirements of this Cause, the allurements and trivialities of the world and the pitfalls of the self within have all played their roles in limiting the extent and intensity of my flame, my candle-power, my ability to lead, to live the life, as Bahais often use that phrase.(See Shoghi Effendi, Bahai Administration, p.140) Perhaps through some grace of God, some unmerited favour, rather than through some native common sense or planning, I have been able to develop a generalist's rather than a specialists's knowledge and to obtain a wide life-experience rather than one confined to one or two towns, one or two jobs, one or two Bahai communities or one or two psychobiological states. Looking back over nearly 60 years of Bahai experience(1953-2010) I feel I have had to remake myself many times as the Bahai communities I have lived in have also had to remake themselves. If anything has been achieved in the realms of thought it has been by the grace of God and not thanks to any native common sense. And it will continue to be so during this paradigm.

MY YEARS OF RETIREMENT

During the first years(2006-2012) of my retirement from FT, PT and all casual-employment, a process that took place by stages in the years 1999 to 2005, I gradually accustomed myself to making both reading and writing the dual occupations of my time and energy, with the reading essentially in the form of research for the writing. The softer occupation of reading for its own sake was not an indulgence I permitted myself. Travelling, which has always been a useful stimulus for my mind, like reading, I did only in my head and with the aid of the print and electronic media, after decades of moving and travelling from town to town, to over 100 towns and cities. I have been able, as 'Abdul-Baha writes in one of His thousands of letters, "to focus my thinking on a single point" in the hope that "it will become an effective force."(Selections, p.111)

I had had many years of difficulty in town after town as far back as my youth and I began to realize, during these years of the new paradigm and as I approached my retirement and my experience of it,that all the tribulations I had suffered over those decades had been for a purpose. They had a preparatory function as described in the newly published book "Memories of Nine years in Akka" on page 184. I am not going to go into detail here for the details are very personal and deeply meaningful and, if readers are curious as to my meaning here they can go to the wonderful new book by Dr. Youness Afroukhteh(2003). It is one of the many new books published during this new paradigm. Publishing is an element of the paradigm that should not go without notice in a review of its central features and the Bahai experience during its fate-laden 15 years thusfar at the turn of the millennium. Readers can also go to my own autobiography in 3 parts here at BLO if they want more details of my life-narrative.

And so it is that my book has become part of a strenuous, but pleasureable, plenitude of activity in these years of my retirement from another strenuous but often pleasureable world that had kept my nose to the grindstone, in one way or another, for forty years(1959-1999). Of course, to imply that all of life up to my retirement at the age of 55 in 1999 had been a 'nose-to-the-grindstone' experience would be far from the truth. My nose was often lifted-up to the skies with pleasures and enjoyments that were far, far, from that grindstone. During my retirement, though, and as this paradigm progressed I accustomed myself to making writing and not reading the first charge on my time and energy. Much of my human action was in the form of writing. Indeed, it was Life in Action. As the poet Longfellow once wrote:

I shot an arrow in the air,
It fell to earth I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.

Longfellow goes on to describe the role and function of the writer and poet and it is much like the description given in the book of Ecclesiastes(xi,1): "Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days." The effects of my writing, I could see very plainly in the last several years, were being produced at distances thousands of miles and years away from by birthplace and my place of current residence. I came gradually to the view that my work, my writing, was not going to die with me, as Leonardo da Vinci once wrote. Of course, absolute certainty I did not have and I had to live with the possibility that, as Robert Burns once wrote: "the best laid schemes" of mice and men might indeed, "gang a-gley."(To a Mouse, stanza 5)

To some people this activity of writing in which I have now been engaged in during this paradigm for more than a decade is not a sign, an expression, of a man of action. Writing is an enterprise, a form of work, that appears inert to the human eye because this occupation involves no movement or at least a very minimal one and one that takes place from a sitting position. In my case the sitting position is in my study just beside my wife's garden. The activity I am engaged in, though, is a creative one and, as I quote above from Ecclesiaties(xi,1), the act when completed and placed in cyberspace is like casting one's bread upon the waters and finding it after many days. On the waters of the internet, I have indeed found much of my writing after many days, months and, now, years. The activity of writing this book about/within this new paradigm, for that is where I locate this work in the narrative that is my life, has the power of producing effects at distances thousands of miles away from where I am writing.

I am rather of the view that these thoughts I am now putting on the page will not die with me although, to reiterate, one can not be absolutely sure of just how one's words go on living after they are put on the page and then clicked into place onto sites on the world-wide-web. In life there is much about which one can not be absolutely sure. I see this book and my writing as part of my human mission to work, not as some writers see themselves, for the coming of the Kingdom of God on Earth but as part of an exercise within the framework of that Kingdom having already arrived. This new Kingdom needs workers and I am one of them. This culture of learning and growth, this new paradigm, is a great event in the Bahai community in the last two decades and it is part and parcel of this Kingdom--from a Bahai perspective and certainly from the perspective of this Bahai who writes and sits and who thinks and moves about--moves about far less than he did for more than the first five decades of his life. As Edward Gibbon wrote in his memoirs "the first of earthly blessings is independence." I cannot claim to have this intellectual gem in totality but I have it more than ever before in my life.

This new paradigm is at the core of the real war which has motivated me to write this book. We each must select our wars and battles, our skirmishes and engagements, in life in order that we may fight the fight and walk the walk. My belief in the importance of this theme, this topic, this new culture of learning and growth, is attested by my writing this 420 page document. I have cut back other activity, other writing projects, from necessity or desire, due to sickness or to my being "a burnt-out case," as I sometimes see myself. I have been able to stengthen every fibre of my being for this literary exercise in which my wings were and are free to soar. I chose my writing projects; but sometimes they seem to chose me. In the last several years, the last decade of this new paradigm(2001-2011)I have never found my mind more vigorous or my composition more happy in spite of the rigours of the bipolar disorder with which I must deal.

Food, warmth, sleep, literary sources and my good wife--these are all at present I ask - the ultima thule of my life of wandering desires, as I paraphrase Hazlitt's expression. A walk in nature is a vital necessity in my life. My morning and evening pills keep a steady hand on my emotions and my bipolar disorder. I watch the boats go by and the flowers in my wife's garden. My walk through life is now on a literary path with a thin curtain drawn around it to protect my solitude. On this path are ranged rich portraits of the history of a new Faith and its developing new paradigm. I aim on a daily basis to lift aside the veils, for life has many to keep us from the beauty of the unseen, to see the wonders of existence and play the music of the spheres. Memory recalls other times in my life, other places which occupied me in Bahai community life. I go on some 10 home visits every month and return home, take up my writing and draw my chair to the fire of creativity. I often fall short in my literary aims as a writer, a writer who has inherited a vast tradition with its high standards. I try to capture the vitality of my own experience of life and art and help make my readers richer for sharing in that experience.

The pains, the tests and difficulties of life and the desire to engage in what seemed to me to be a more profitable, a more successful, form of teaching drove me, by my mid-fifties and in the first Plan(1996-2000) at the start of this new paradigm, to seek consolation in intellectual activities. I have taken to writing as some men might take to drink, to drive away tensions and difficulties which could not be solved on the physical plane. This involved a rigid cutting-back of other activities. There was a great release of strength that came from a long obstructed stream that could at last break forth. Years of training shaped my approach and my daily activity. I had developed the habit of letting my mind play around a problem and trying to grasp it whole before plunging into an attempt to solve it in detail in a literary form. The acquisition of information is only a start. I needed to reconstruct and rediscover the nature of this paradigm to place it in a personal context in which I could play as extensive a part as was possible--given the limitations of my health. This was true as I went about constructing this book and as my health continued to be a problem throughout the first 15 years of this new Bahai culture.

I construct my reality and it, in turn, constructs me. This means, so goes one of the many theories in sociology first described in the 1960s as the social construction of reality, that I am shaped within the stories I, as a human being, tell. This is true of all of us to greater and lesser extents depending on several factors like our story-telling capacity and our imaginations, our memories and the details of our social experience. The processes of the evolution of this Cause have long caught my imagination and the cultural heritage that has been my Faith, the Bahai Faith, has made me sensitive to all sorts of heroism and hints, features and facts and from this heritage. Many of the intuitions, the hints and the facts and their implications are found in this work.

The world, modern history, in my lifetime and the lifetime of my parents has been so full of shocking public events and these events, I have little doubt, have tended to be fecund, to be productive, of the intellectual inspiration for this writing. These events, beginning arguably with the Great War to end all wars and continuing into this third millennium, have been so catastrophic that the historian and sociologist in me, as well as the psychologist and the spiritual journeyman that inhabits my being--have led me to ask questions and seek answers. The poignant woes in my personal life, in my society and in the experience of the Bahai community offer to my imagination very promising subjects; in some ways the tragic subjects subjects are more promising that those which are the joys and victories--and there have been many. In some ways, too, it has been my good fortune to be born in a Time of Troubles for it has been these troubles that formed the basis, at least in part, for my desire to deal with what has been flung at me by this current of events. This book is a natural bi-product of my life experience, both directly and indirectly as an observer. This experience in all its forms has led to a fertility of creative expression of which this book is but a part: or so it seems to me. If there was a barrenness of intellectual and creative power in my life in the years before this paradigmatic change in the Bahai community, it was due to many reasons that would be a tangent to the thrust of this work.

The stream of my intellect I feel, looking back over several decades, had been forced by circumstances to be obstructed by either practical concerns or by the lack of an all-consuming literary task. It has only recently been able to break forth and it has been doing so for at least the last decade,2001 to 2011, if not longer on this and other literary tasks, goals and projects. It has taken me some years to apprehend more than a fragment of the mental wealth that has been poured into my lap by sensible and insensible degrees in the years of this paradigm. I still have only a very inadequate notion of the limits and the extent of this theme, this personal aspect of the paradigm--as well as other aspects of this Cause as it has been effloresing in recent decades, in the years that have been my life, the several epochs of Abdul-Bahas Divine Plan.

In the earlier decades of my life I have had a schooling, a training, a grounding, a priming, a coaching, an accustoming, of my mind and heart in the communication of ideas to other minds over these same long decades. I had to develop so many skills in precision, in the acquisition of information and transferring it to others. All these skills have been and are indispensable in the art of literary composition on which I am now focussed. This literary work, this constancy in intellectual labour, is as much a goal-oriented creative mission, an occupation-vocation-process as a consolation, as a pleasurable employment and transmission of energy. As that successful novelist Anthony Trollope emphasizes in his Autobiography, "these things conquer all difficulties."(chapters 7 and 20). Well, to some extent, Anthony.

In writing, as in daily life, one does not connect with everyone. Like the paradigm itself, I have my unloving critics and my critical lovers and a vast host of indifferents as well as those who will never know of my writing at all immersed as they--as we all--are in a knowledge explosion that they/we can scarcely keep their/our heads, their/our minds and hearts from being inundated by and disconnected with from time to time for fear of drowning. We are all living at what appears to be the greatest climacteric in the history of the evolution of human kind at least since the agricultural revolution some twelve thousand years ago.

My working tempo is set for me by a psychic chronometer with intellect and a spiritual creativity like the hands of the clock, my clock, my working psychology, so to speak. This work is no mere passive receptivity but one of active curiosity, the asking of questions, the search for meaning and the quest for an understanding of God's vision at work in history through the channel of this paradigm. Indeed, my receptivity manifests itself in a willingness to participate in the process of community building which is just beginning in this new paradigm. It is I who do the defining of the extent and form, the way and means of my participation. This book had been incubating and gestating for several years before I started writing it four years ago. I can hear at my back time's winged chariot hurrying near. I roll all my strength and sweetness into a ball and, though I cannot make the sun stand still, I like to think I can make him run as Andrew Marvell puts it in his poetic masterful words.(See his poem: 'To His Coy Mistress'). The shocking events of my time and age, going as far back as the early years in the lives of my parents during the Great War(1914-1918), if not those of my grandparents and great-grandparents during the lives of Bahaullah and the Bab Themselves, have been a fecund source--as I say elsewhere in this book--of inspiration. I feel it is my good fortune to have been entering retirement at this stage in this climacteric of history-just as the Bahai community was crossing the bridge to the third millennium on history's stage.

This book is a product of the good fortune that has been my life and its diverse experience. Further literary efforts within this new paradigm will continue so long as I am not afflicted by any barrenness of intellectual and creative power. This book is also but a fragment of a harvest that has resulted from years of plowing intellectual, inter-disciplinary and highly diverse fields of knowledge. This book is, in addition, but a fragment of my participation in the discourses of society in many of the social spaces I have inhabited since leaving my home in the Golden Horseshoe at the western end of Lake Ontario in the mid-1960s. Living in 25 towns and 37 houses, teaching groups as diverse as Inuit and Aboriginals, senior executives and pre-primary kids, children at all levels of education and adults at all levels of life, living across two continents, experiencing two marriages and at least two of my own personalities at each end of the planet, I was ready to travel in cyberspace by the time the third millennium turned its corner a decade ago after the first five years of this new paradigm. Life had given me, by the time I retired in 1999 and turned to writing full-time, a rich base for dialogue, for interchange, for analysis and for my work on the internet. In the last decade I have been involved in an exercise in teaching and consolidation as well as social action undreamt of in the first four decades of my life as a Bahai: 1959-1999. Finally, my belief in the importance of this paradigmatic shift is attested by my act of writing this book.

At the start of the particular project of writing three-and-a-half years ago(9/07-2/11), and even after much serious labour on it, I had a very inadequate notion of the possibilities or the limits, the extent or the outreach of this theme. The progressive expansion of this oeuvre to some 420 pages has been no flash of inspiration but, rather a gradual expression of feelings and thoughts in the form of poetry and prose within the factual base that is this paradigm. These feelings and thoughts find expression here in lyrical, epic, narrative and dramatic genres of writing which readers may find a little over the top, as they say these days, too emotive, too grandiose, even too evangelical, to use a term that is not enjoying much of a press these days.

Some readers will certainly find this book too long for their tastes coming to Bahai Library Online and hoping for a short exposition, an essay of digestible length that they can chew over during a few pages of reading. After spending more than half a century in classrooms as either a teacher or a student, from 1949 to 2005, I am only too well aware of the human incapacity to digest print when it comes in large doses. But write I must even if only for a coterie and even if it goes on at far too indigestible a length for most readers. Much of life for me has been, as it has been and is for millions, a fatuous cycle of impulse and activity on the one hand and idleness and sloth on the other. This no longer is the case. Materialism, Tocqueville, once emphasized, enervates and soul and unbends the springs of action(Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy, Marvin Zetterman, Stanford UP, 1967, p.64); domesticity is reinforced and social ties are loosened, he continues in an analysis that explains much of the problem and dilemma behind participation in the new Bahai paradigm.

EVANGELISM AND PROPHECY

The evangelism in this book, if there is any, and in this new Bahai paradigm is very different from that found in the many forms in other religions, especially Protestant Christianity which western readers get exposed to in their daily lives in different ways. One of the best known—and most controversial—theological varieties of evangelism, for example, is the doctrine of the “rapture,” a belief underpinned by a reading of 1 Thessalonians 4:16-18 in which the true church is expected to be “caught up in the air” to meet Jesus and the saints in heaven. According to some proponents of this view, Christ will effectively return twice: first, secretly, to rapture the church, removing true believers from earth while the rest of humanity suffers the tribulation; and again, publicly, at the end of the tribulation, after which he will set up his thousand-year millennial kingdom on earth. Between these events, a seven year period of suffering known as the “tribulation” will take place, in which God will unleash his wrath upon those who have failed to accept Jesus as their personal saviour.

The Bahai view of prophecy, of apocalypticism and dispensationalism is very different from the many Protestant views of which this particular variety of evangelism is among the more popular. The Bahai views of prophecy are worlds away from the many Protestant forms. The Bahai views in many other areas of modern Christian theology, as well as much modern secular thought, are also worlds away. Bahais aiming to put into place many of the goals of this paradigm need to keep in mind the immense gaps between the many cosmologies they will find in their dialogue with others and the several major articulations of the Bahai cosmology.

It has been this way, living with this immense gap in thought, in all my Bahai life, and in the lives of Bahais in the West for as long as this Faith has been plowing in the fields of hopeful expansion. The intellectual paradigm which underpins the new Bahai culture of learning and growth and many of the paradigms underpinning much that is taking place in the wider society and its pluralistic culture, though, have been growing closer since the mid-1990s--or so it seems to me. The new Bahai culture and its community building, initiated only within the last two decades, is growing to meet a multitude of other cultures in the context of this new paradigm. Who knows what will transpire in the decades ahead as the world seeks answers to its enigmatic problems and puzzles and finds in the Bahai community a model for world fellowship.

JOY AND CELEBRATION

Lyricism, rejoicing, exultation and celebration at the achievements of the Bahai community all find expression in this book as well as the spirit of evangelism. I have nothing but praise for the amazing qualities of endurance and patience exercised by the Bahai community in the more than a century and a half of heroism in Bahai history. My work is, in some ways, both an elegy and an eulogy, a commemoration and a memorial, a monument and a remembrance, an acclamation and an accolade, an adulation and an applause,a commendation and a compliment, an encomium and an exaltation, a glorification and a laudation,a paean and a panegyric, a plaudit and a salutation to the achievements and victories, the sorrows and suffering found in this and other paradigms in the Bahai historical experience.

There is a joy at the dawn of this new Order which has begun to flow around the planet by sensible and insensible degrees in the years after the passing of Bahaullah in 1892. My feelings echo Wordsworth's famous lines: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,//But to be young was very heaven. And I might add "to be in the evening of my life with decades of work within these years of the dawn behind me--is also very heaven." I see this work as part of my soul's response to an epiphany that is something more than a merely temporal event. The dawn that has awakened this joy is an irruption into time out of eternity by a Manifestation of God in our time.

THE TRUE MEASURE OF A RELIGION

I am not blind, though, to the interpersonal problems, the failings, the ineptitude, the gross stupidity and the many many inadequacies both in myself and in the behaviour of my fellow believers. If one was to judge this Faith by the believers, indeed, if one was to judge any religion or philosophy, by its adherents, one would find that group wanting. The greatness of this Faith does not lie in the comings and goings, the deeds and doings of those who claim to be its members. The greatness of this Faith lies in the most wondrous human being ever to exist on this planet, the Founder of the Bahai Faith, Bahaullah and the explicit provisions He made for His legitimate succession and, in the process, for establishing an Order, a System, which is seen by the Bahai community as part of the Revelation Itself--and is known as the Covenant. The result of His life and those provisions will be the gradual realization of His Wondrous Vision, a Vision which constitutes the brightest emanation of His Mind and the fairest fruit of the fairest civilization that the world has yet seen. The realization of that Wondrous Vision has made a remarkable start in these years of my life and some of that story is found here. Some of it is taking place in the context of this new paradigm.

One can not look at the followers of the Truth of any of the great religions for the truth; the sign of the truth is to be found in the Great Beings Who were the Founders. This if true of Jesus and Christianity, of Muhammed and Islam and on and on through other major interventions of the Divine in human affairs at periodic times in history. I could write more here about this important concept and what you might call the cross-cultural messianism that the Bahai Faith espouses. I could write more about the theophanology, the much fuller theophany that is found in the Bahai religion.

The world hardly suffers from a shortage of ideas in the vast field of religious studies. In this paradigm or in previous paradigms the opposite is the case. Humanity runs the serious risk of suffocating in a surfeit of ideas which are either so vast, so self-evident and so urgent as to generate intense anxiety--or so esoteric and divisive as to preclude any unified approach to their exmaination and even discourage any general interest. This paradigm provides, at least for the Bahai community, a unfied approach. The Bahai Cause has a vital contribution to make to the unity of the children of men, to the search for world unity. Its central theme was enunciated more than a century ago in a remarkable series of letters and books by this Faith's Founder addressed from His penal cell in the Turkish colony of Akka. That theme was the emergence of a global civilization and, after more than one hundred years, humankind has moved into its long struggle with the enormous new social and material forces, not in the context of a search for unity, but rather, in one of attachment to the sectarian, political, nationalisitc and racal loyaltuies of the past. The result is the world we live in and it is this world which is the backdrop to this paradigm.

A ONE MILLION YEAR CYCLE AND ITS PERIODS

The cycle which began with Adam is divided into three periods ending nearly 500,000 years from now. The Bahai Era(B.E.), beginning in 1844, is the second period in that cycle: 1844 to 2844. This entire cycle is dominated, according to Abdul-Baha, by the specifically Bahai principle of the political and religious unification of the planet for human welfare. The theophany expressed in the Bahai teachings flows through this new paradigm. This is a much wider focus, a different topic, and it concerns itself with the next half a million years. Those years will see changes in the sphere of cultural evolution much different than those which have taken place in the cycle since the emergence of Homo heidelbergensis 500,000 years ago, a now extinct species of the genus homo and arguably a distant precursor to Homo sapiens sapiens.

I wrote the following two prose-poems about Homo heidelbergensis and I trust these pieces of writing which follow place for readers the million years I refer to here in a long-range, a colourful and intellectually stimulating perspective. This perspective may not be that useful to readers as they go about putting this new paradigm into practice in the years ahead; for we all must focus on the here and now, on what is in front of our nose so to speak. But, for me, this long range, what you might call this anthropological and futuristic perspective is part of the Bahai vision, at least my version of it--and vision creates reality as Horace Holley used to say.

FORTUITOUS

The political and religious unification of the planet for human welfare is the principle that is gradually coming to dominate this cycle, a cycle which began about 6000 B.P., several thousand years after the first signs of the emergence of agricultural civilization in a known as the neolithic revolution. The first full-blown manifestation of the entire Neolithic complex is seen in the Middle Eastern Sumerian cities(ca. 5,300 BC) whose emergence also inaugurates the end of the prehistoric Neolithic and the beginning of historical time. This cycle, according to ‘Abdu’l-Baha, will last for 500,000 years and we are, at the moment, at the start of the second period in this cycle(1844-2844).(1)

The first proto-states developed in Mesopatamia, Egypt and India at about 6000 B.P. The concepts and the principles involved in the development of the nation state can be analysed and discussed as they are in political anthropology, political sociology and history among other social science disciplines. For my purposes here, the union, the federation of seven Dutch provinces in 1581, independent of a monarch could be said to initiate the start of the modern phase of the nation state. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648, signed when parties who had been at war for 30 years came together, could also be seen as marking another critical stage in the development of modern nationhood. It was the first time that a European community of sovereign states was established. And it was only possible because all of its members recognized each other as having equal legal standing, and guaranteed each other their independence. They had to recognize their international legal treaties as binding, if they wanted to be an international community of law.

Previous cycles in physical and cultural evolution are not referred to as “cycles”, as far as I know, by ‘Abdu’l-Baha. But if one goes back to 500,000 B.P. we find, at least since 1907, Homo heidelbergensis, the possible direct ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis. He is seen as part of the proto-human species. He hunted, buried his dead and was developing a complex mind.(2) And so began the story of the million year period in which we are at the mid-point. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)Juan Cole, “The Concept of the Manifestation in the Baha’i Writings,” Baha’i Studies, Vol.9, pp.36-7; and (2) “Science and Nature: Prehistoric Life,” bbc.co.uk, 18 December 2007.

It really only began just the other day--
several thousand years after we began
to settle into agriculture and with the
development of those proto-states in
Mesopotamia, Egypt, India: 6000 B.P.

It really only began just the other day--
after that union of Dutch provinces in
1581 and that Treaty of Westphalia in
1648, landmarks on the way to that big
year 1844 at the start of the 2nd Period
of this Baha’i Era: 1844 to 2844, precursor
of the 3rd period: 2844 to 501,844 A.D.

It really only began just the other day--
the political and religious unification
of Homo.sapiens, sapiens, sub-species
of Homo.sapiens of the genus Homo of
the family Hominidae of that order of

Primates of the class Mammalia of the
phylum Chordata of the kingdom Animalia--
after the great treck out of Africa thousands
and thousands of years ago to cover the globe
in the greatest of journeys, stories, ever told,
but gradually being unfolded by modern science.

And so the units of social organization grew:
clans and chiefdoms, tribes, city states,nations
and now a federation across the face of this planet.
Little by little, day by day in larger and larger
interdependencies. A fortuitous series of synchronized
events bringing this national state, a cultural artefact
created through a spontaneous distillation of discrete
historical events, into existence just at the time
as a Light of Divine guidance appeared in the
Middle East: Shaykh Ahmad, Siyyid Kazim, the Bab,
Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Baha as well as a complete(1)
institutionalization of this immense charismatic Force.(2)

(1) 1743-1921
(2) 1921-1963

ONE MILLION YEARS:POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS UNIFICATION:
THE DOMINANT PRINCIPLE OF THIS CYCLE

Last night I watched “As It Happened: 1929-The Wall Street Crash.”(1) I could not help but reflect on the letters of Shoghi Effendi published in The World Order of Bahá'u'lláh in 1938. These letters had a different aim and a far larger scope than his first letters to the North American Baha’is from 1922 to 1929. These letters, these communications, from 1929 to 1936 unfolded for the Baha’is a much clearer vision than they had previously possessed of the relation between the Bahá'í community and the entire process of social evolution under the dispensation of Bahá'u'lláh. This body of letters were first written just eight months before the Wall Street crash and Shoghi Effendi continued writing these letters into the years of the depression. They were finally published in a collected edition in 1938 as war approach and the depression was finally ending. The period was one of the nadir’s of civilization.

The distinction between the Bahá'í community and the sects and congregations of former religions were made apparent in these letters. These world order letters established in one volume, among other things, the Bahai; Administrative Order as the nucleus and pattern of the world civilization that was then emerging. In the introduction, Horace Holley, the then secretary of the American Bahai community wrote: "In light of the existing international chaos, these letters reveal the most significant Truth of this era, namely that the old conception of religion, which separated spirituality from the fundamental functions of civilization, compelling men to abide by conflicting principles of faith, of politics and of economics, has been forever destroyed."(2) -Ron Price with appreciation to (1)SBS TV, 3 July 2009, 8:30-9:30 p.m. and (2)Wikipedia, 4 July 2009.

The dominant principle of this cycle
is the political and religious unity of
the human species--since the great...
dispersal, radiation, homo erectus...
hominid....Out-of-Africa 2 million
years ago...establishment of sapien
human lineage, genus homo, stone
tools, a rudimentary technology....
Homo heidelbergensis, 500,000 ya
and Homo neanderthalenis-physical
anthropology’s branch and cultural
and social anthropology telling us
of clans, tribes, chiefdoms, then—
city-states, nations and now global
...yes...going global since perhaps
early explorers, say, a 1000 years of
travel on the waters of the earth now
.......
overnight it’s one world on our way
for another 500,000 years of political
and religious unification—that’s the
trip we are now on day by day in the
midst of a tempest, fiery and furious.

THIS EPIC LITERARY WORK

I hope it is obvious to readers by now that there is also an epic response in both this commentary on the new Bahai paradigm and in my total literary oeuvre. There is an expression here of a certain romance that is evoked by conquests and defeats, by treks and voyages and by both the anarchy and the musical flow of the all-embracing ocean of history in our time, a history that this new Faith is caught up with in ways we can scarcely appreciate. The poignant woes and the advancements in modern history in our planetizing society offer to my imagination subjects as equally promising as the history of the successes and tragedies in the Bahai community in the last two centuries.

The successes, the advancements, the progress, in the pluralistic society I have had my being in all my life have been bright with promise; and they are bright with promise in this new Bahai paradigm and especially as the international Bahai community headed into the third millennium a decade ago with the completion of the Arc Project on Mt. Carmel and the developments at the Bahai World Centre in the decade since then. The successes in the Bahai community are beyond doubt and they presage the gradual realization of that Wondrous Vision which constitutes the brightest emanation of Bahaullahs Mind and the fairest frut of the fairest civilization the world has yet seen.(WOB, p.48)

TRUE HEROES

The true heroes of this and any cause are so often the conquered, not the conquering Achilles, but the conquered Hector; these heroes are not always the Bahai teachers who have been responsible for thousands entering the Cause, but they are also the Martha Roots, the George Townshends, the many who have suffered, Abdul-Baha and Shoghi Effendi none of whom rise on page one of their biographies to positions of victory but who lead lives of trial and tribulation, great victory as well as crushing defeat. This study of the new paradigm does not expatiate on the lives of saints and the martyrs, the heroes and heroines over the many decades of Bahai history, however inspirational these lives have been. Other books do this job only too well and there are now, in the years of this new paradigm, many many books found in Bahai bookshops made available by the publishing houses of the Bahai community which have dramatically increased in number around the world in the last quarter century. These books can and will enrich the knowledge base beyond the core of learning provided in the Ruhi Books.

In the treks and voyages of Abdul-Baha and Bahaullah, in those of Bahiyyih Khanum and Lua Getsinger, of Martha Root and of Keith Ransom-Keilor, in those of the many others of significance and insignificance in the epic story-narrative that is Bahai history, the wondrous history of the Bahai community has just begun; the path has just been landscaped; the garden has just been planted. The story has continued and will continue in the decades ahead in this new paradigm. The epic theme, the great and grand metanarrative that is the history of this Cause will continue within the years of this new paradigm on projects and plans, with perils and pitfalls that we can, as yet, scarcely imagine. This paradigm is part of the latest chapter in a long story, a story that this book takes back to the middle of the 18th century, although with only brief stopovers in the years from the 1740s to the 1840s and the 1840s to the 1940s.

I was not born until 1944 and I do not go into any detail on paradigms in Bahai history before my birth. This book, readers must remember, has a very personal retrospect and prospect. There is a poetry in this long narrative of more than two centuries and in this latest chapter of only 15 years. To a significant extent it is my poetry and a poetry which could never have been written without a community context. I convey some of this poetry in these pages with a feeling for the drama in the facts of the story and even a degree of awe at the epiphany of God's plan in the context of Abdul-Bahas Divine Plan that is playing itself out in our time--in its first epochs. I convey some of the historical panorama of this new paradigm which impinges on my eyes as a spectator and participant in its often seemingly mundane events. And I try to "run with patience the race that is set before me."(The Bible,Hebrews,xii,i)

When a man or woman find their true qiblah, their spirit rises to the full height of their powers and in each person the process seems towork itself out differently. There is a feeling that is transfigured into a sense of awe and, for some, the result is poetry. Readers will find some of that here.

In its totality, this book gives glimpses of a complex whole that is the Bahá’í community as seen in the light of this new paradigm at the centre of this community spanning as it does some 6,000 clusters and 120,000 localities around the globe. But only glimpses of this whole are found here because this essay or book is not a history of the Bahai Faith nor a review of its teachings, not a scholarly study of its community life nor the Faith's philosophy, not on overview of its sociology or psychology. This book has become a sort of pot-pourri of many aspects of the above, but with a focus on this new paradigm, a paradigm that is now part and parcel of the way this new world religion goes about much of its community life, its outward thrusts and its inward being. This book is not a review of contemporary Bahai history since 1996, since the start of this new paradigm, nor any one of a number of topics that are dealt with in a host of other books in what is now a burgeoning literature on this new world religion, a literature that few can keep up with as this new paradigm takes off into what seem like quickening years and quickening winds in a global tempest unprecedented in its magnitude in this new millennium.

This book is part of what seems to have become a permanent lure on my intellectual literary horizon, an ever-receding and never captured intellectual quarry, like that electric hare for the greyhound on the racing track. It is part of a process that keeps my brain running at full-tilt, at full-stretch, these days with an eagerness which flags every day after some eight hours of work as I try to catch what I can with this vaulting curiosity. I am able to satisfy, though, a craving which has been damned back for decades and has accumulated, in the process and over time, a powerful sense of urgency. I have also been inspired in my writing by the work of many others, too many to name here. This renewed, rather than unflagging, curiosity, like some divine wind which blows my ship, shows no sign of becoming becalmed. It generates higher faculties, higher flights, goals to make something of my life, to leave a mark, to provide some useful knowledge to add to humanity's common stock. Time will tell, of course, just how useful that knowledge becomes to the Bahai community in the future. From the feedback I have received thusfar, I have no doubt of its present utility at least to a coterie, a few readers out there in cyberspace.

SOLITUDE AND SOCIAL INTERACTION: AN INDIVIDUAL RECIPE AND MENU

As I mentioned above, each individual must work out for themselves their own combination of social interaction on the one hand and solitude on the other as they go about working out their role in this new paradigm. The permutations and combinations that are found in the myriad relationships that constitute the tone and texture, the fibre, of the Bahai community are staggering in their immensity when viewed across the globe amongst the several million Bahais. There are many shoulds and musts, many obligations and duties, many responsibilities and activities on the agenda of our lives as Bahais in this new paradigm----and no one can dismiss these realities, realities which sometimes may appear harsh and demanding. Each of us must work out what we can cope with, what is within our competence, our capacities, our circumstances.

Many of of the realities of the overall commitment of being a Bahai are not new with this paradigm. The commitment that is at the centre of our lives as Bahais determines so much that becomes the life we have led. We each must chose for ourselves what part we will play in what often may appear to be a litany of endless and weighty tasks. Each of our individual misfortunes and merits, our transitory and decade-long life experience, must be transmuted into acts of engagement if the dross of egotism and animus is to be refined away and replaced by virtues. It all takes place within the limits of our incapacity as we exercise this engagement in a multitude of ways during our years on Earth.

The public misfortune, the global disasters are so catastrophic in the wider world in which we are enmeshed that each person must find their personal form of identification with the pubic sphere and its disasters and its outrageous fortune. Our sense of private spiritual malaise on the one hand and the transforming affects of the indwelling God on the other needs to be so intense that one can not be left in peace. The result of this concern is a sting to our conscience with an urge to action, a push to participation. The result and that sting requires of us participation in this new paradigm, each in our own way. the push we receive must come from within and not from the sense of duty imposed upon us by overzealous fellow believers. Indeed, the capacity to say "no" and to be our own person is crucial if we are not to be crushed in the drama that is this newe paradigm in these hours before the dawn, as the House wrote in a recent message, in what well may be the darkest hours in history.

In my case, after 50 years of various forms of practical activity in the Bahai community(1959-2009), I am now pursuing the practical life by literary means and entering into the mansions of the finest thoughts and writings, the most relevant analyses of history and sociology, psychology and philosophy, among other social sciences and humanities and eating of the ambrosia that I like to think I was born to eat--although complete certitude that I am doing the right thing at the right time--in this as in any other activity in one's life is an elusive emotional experience. Still, this writing and this book invite a totality of response unchecked by any "maybe" and it stimulates a critical reaction unstigmatized by the blame of the blamer. Bahaullah is the archtypal Poet and he has called each of us with such a calling that we cannot but run towards the Ocean of His Cause:

with the whole enthusiasm of our hearts, with all the eagerness of our souls, the full fervour of our will and the concentrated efforts of our entire beings.(Gleanings, p.321).

In these hours of mental retreat in these recent years of my retirement from FT, PT and most casual-volunteer work, this exhausted practitioner, this burnt-out case, this sufferer from: bipolar disorder, an obsessive compulsive personality disorder and a good dollup of Tourette's Syndrome among a list of practical everyday activities and concerns which must be attended to like: Feasts, firesides, deepenings, devotional meetings, dusting, vacuuming, cooking, washing dishes and taking care of the garbage--this sufferer is freer from the burdens of the practical life than at any other time in his path, except perhaps his early-to-mid childhood back in the mid-to-late 1940s and early 1950s.

I have been able to transmute the energies which I formerly devoted to the world of being a student and a wage earner, being a parent and a highly active Bahai in the social dimension of community experience, being a much more socially involved person with an extensive agenda of practical concerns associated with people in community--to a series of intellectual works. Hopefully these thoughts will have some longevity but, even if they do not, they have a field of discourse in the contemporary world which I could hardly have dreamt of in those five decades of down-to-earth activity, say, 1953-2003.

The events which I have chosen to write about are not only those in the first 15 years of this new paradigm, but also my experience and the Bahai experience of community over the seven decades, 1937 to 2007, the first seven decades of the extension of this Cause to the four corners of the Earth, an event, a phenomenon unprecedented in the annals of humankind and scarcely appreciated by humankind at this juncture in history. There are many minds infatuated with other spectacles and other studies. This book is an expression of my infatuation with what I see as a field of immense personal profitability. I hope others can share in my sense of enthusiasm. I can but hope. I have been an eyewitness to the Westernization and globalization, the planetization of humankind to a degree unapproach in previous epochs of this Cause. This unific series of events, highly complex in their several manifestations, are events which have been synchronized and coextensive with the expansion of the Bahai Faith to the interstices of the globe in the first century of its Fromative Age, 1921-2021--and they are especially synchronized with the first years of this new paradigm, 1996 to 2010---and, a fortiori, beyond into the second century of that Formative Age. And I will see these developments beyond 2021 in all their anarchy and chaos, all their wonder and awe, should I live beyond the age of 77!

The Bahai view of history is teleological. The natural world is, as Abdul-Baha stated "under the complete control of God"(Some Answered Questions, p.196). The entire creation was from the beginning subject to a plan which evolved according to law. The history of humankind is to evolve toward the endless perfections of the species. This is an a priori system. It is slow and is accomplished by degrees. It is organic and there is progress through providential intervention and providential control of the historical process. This Bahais sometimes call progressive relevation. This of course is only stating the obvious to the Bahai of many years standing however complex the process is in its actual working out. There is no contempus mundi here--no historical pessimism. Each of our roles as Bahais is to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization and now, in these years, we do this in the context of this new culture of learning and growth. The core of the struggle for each of us is to improve ourselves. The readiness and the intelligence with which we each play our part affects our happiness and progress.

In these periods of enforced leisure, between short spurts of engagement in some of the everyday aspects of this new paradigm, I continue my literary work, my act of creation. While the world is going to wrack and ruin, as it often feels bewildered, agonized and helpless and as this Cause is expanding in ways hardly appreciated by the vast bulk of humankind--and, I might add, by many of the Bahais themselves--we each must put one foot in front of the other, so to speak. This literay work of mine is no pearl of great price but it is for me, at least, a small gem cast upon the waters. My writing in all its forms may, in the end, be what Roger White said of most poetry: it may only make a sound and have a significance like that of a feather dropped into the rushing waters of the river at the foot of the grand-canyon. But write I must driven by some inner force that I can only partly explain.

My life, by the age of 55, was rudely shattered yet again by the vicissitudes and rigours of bipolar disorder, by a physical enervation requiring injections of testosterone as well as utter fatigue with my work as a professional teacher and with the demands of my activity in community. But this shattering took place as my generation was experiencing a crystallization of the forces of unity, titanic forces under the various names of planetization, globalization, techno-electronic unification which will be with us as a species for millennia to come. This eruption of unific forces, this volcano of global energies, had been breaking out, arguably, for more than a century, but it took off in my generation and especially during this paradigm. This work, this book, is in part my response to this eruption. It is a response, an engagement in a hearty endeavour that feels more effectual than the many years spent in company and conversation, in meetings and in coming-and-going from room-to-room, home-to- home, group-to-group and town-to-town. I still do some of this coming-and-going but far less than I did in the years 1959 to 1999.

I now feel as if I have time to mend my partial understandings, to correct some of the defects and infirmities of my constitution and nature by observation and reflection. I have become much more conscious of how weak and foolish so much of my former activity in life has been and how blind I have been as a surveyor of the inclinations and affections of both myself and other men. I am not beating myself over these sins of omission and commission but they help to moderate any sense of prideand posturing that I might be inclined to let slip from the dogs of my inner life. I now enjoy a tranquillity and serenity of mind not equalled in any previous year of my life and it is this ease and quietness which allows me to pursue this literary work with a focus I have never been able to achieve except in employment, community work and family life. Much of this tranquillity is due to a package of medications which took me many years to fully accept, to entertain with a full compliance, but it is tranquillity nevertheless. Whether what I write will achieve a breadth and profundity of vision and form, whether it manifests sheer intellectual power I must leave for others to judge whether they be my contemporaries or future readers whom I will never know.

SOME PERSONAL BACKGROUND

I came into the Bahai community in the 1950s at a time when this infant Faith community was still in its earliest days in the West. It had just finished the sixth decade of its history in the West: 1894-1954. There were, perhaps, three hundred Bahais at the most in Canada and less than one hundred in Australia at the time my mother saw an advertisement in the local paper. I have lived all my life on this mortal coil in these two countries, these two Bahai communities which were struggling then in the 1950s as they are struggling now to expand their membership beyond a meagre few. Now Canada is struggling with its 30,000 membership and Australia with its (circa) 20,000 strong community. I became a Bahai in the last half of the third major organized teaching Plan of 1953 to 1963 as a dark heart of an age of transition was about to open, as humanity sat on the edge of self-destruction in that post-world-war II society of the Cold War in the first years after the discovery of the A-bomb. The signs of social breakdown were increasing with every passing day then as they are now and as they have been, arguably since the coming of Bahaullah and the Bab. The processes of breakdown, of progress and decline are complex ones, though, and too difficult to deal with her ein any detail.

After several decades of community experience and work as a teacher both in the Bahai community and professionally at all levels of formal education the seeds of my thought began to germinate more extensively as the Arc Project advanced in those fin de siecle years. By the fifth decade of my Bahai experience(1993-2003) I began to put my burgeoning thoughts into some order and I will go on doing so, for it is an endless task, until the last syllable of my recorded time or some trauma, like senile dementia, takes over my faculties. It is not possible for me to be sucked back into the turmoil of practical affairs from which so many never extricate themselves due to my several infirmities, illnesses which simply do not allow me to engage in any activity for more than about two hours at any one stretch. Nothing can now draw me back into that maelstrom of a fully engaged community life since such engagement, such an intense level of social/people involvement, is simply beyond my physical and psychological, my emotional and social capacity. If readers want to read about my health problems in more detail they can go to Bahai Library Online, this very site and read a 60,000 word description.

But I have also found a fullness of life, of participation in this new paradigm, that is and was not possible to achieve in any other way; I had found a haven where my mind is/was as free as it could be from the various worries which had occupied me all of my Bahai life.

I make the occasional passing comment on contemporary history and politics, current events and the recent crises of the recent fin de siecle years and the first decade of the 21st century. I will insert here three prose-poems in the context of what is the most extensive comment in this book on contemporary times, the years of this new paradigm and some events leading up to it. I wrote these poems in 2001 on the day after the 9/11 event, in 2003 and in 2008 by which time the paradigm was largely in place with criticisms at least partially losing their heat on the internet. These small literary efforts were written 5, 7 and 12 years, respectively, into this new paradigm, just after I retired from FT and PT work and as many of the forms of casual-volunteer activity as I could to make, what seemed to me, a more significant contribution to this new paradigm than I had done in the last years of the 20th century, indeed, in the forty years of my previous Bahai life from 1959 to 1999. The three prose-poems are entitled "A New-Old War," "Those Minaretes of the West," and "Forces of Darkness."

A NEW-OLD WAR

In my last weeks in the classroom as a full-time teacher from February to April 1999 and in the first weeks of an early retirement at the age of 55 from a profession that had occupied me since the 1960s; in what was spring in the Antipodes and living as I was in one of the most remote cities on the planet,Perth Western Australia--a series of meetings finalized the organization, the leadership and the financial backing for a coordinated suicide attack that had been initially proposed to Osma Bin Laden and al-Qaeda in 1996. That attack was centred on the crashing of two airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. Five years and five months after that series of meetings, on 9 September 2001, two hijacked airliners crashed into the Twin Towers and the Towers collapsed. A War on Terrorism had begun, at least that was the argument in a series of TV programs, “The Secret History of 9/11,” SBS TV, 12:00-1:00 a.m. 11 September 2008.

Between that spring of 1999 and the autumn of 2001: President Clinton expressed the view that “the greatest regret of his presidency was his failure to take serious action against al-Qaedi and Osama Bin Laden.” George W. Bush’s presidency had begun; I had moved to Tasmania from Western Australia in what Downunder is called a sea-change; I had gone on my pilgrimage to the Baha’i World Centre in 2000 and begun to receive a Disability Support Pension in 2001. The story of my disability can be found on the internet at "RonPrice,BPD." In the spring of 2001 I also began a new life of publishing extensively on the internet of which my disability story was but one of the 1000s of pieces of writing. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs; and with thanks to (1)Internet Sites on “The Secret History of 9/11,” SBS TV, 12:00-1:00 a.m. 11 September 2008.

When the War on Terror began
I was ready for I, too, had been
part of a long and secret war for
some four decades with all the
ideal forces and confirmations
rushing to support, reinforcing
and opening doors, razing those
impregnable castles to the ground
so that I could attack the right and
left wings of the hosts wherever I
lived and had my being, so that I
could break through the lines of
the legions and carry my attack to
the very centre of earth’s powers.

I had tried to be firm in that Covenant;
I had tried to show fellowship and love;
I had travelled north to south, east to west,
across two continents: my spirit attracted,
my resolution firm, my magnanimity—at
least some of the time—exalted; my intention
pure—well, as far as I was able. I tried to
avoid controversy—as far as I was able.
My thought at peace—as far as I was able.
To each, it seems, we have our engagements
with only some doors opening and some
thoughts at peace and only partly pure.

FORCES OF DARKNESS(1)

This poem started, was inspired, by watching ‘a history of terrorism’ in the twentieth century on ABC TV in Australia.(2) The writers and producers of this program took July 22nd 1946 as the starting point for terrorism’s new affliction for human society. This hypothetical beginning to the history of terrorism coincided with the first months of the second Seven Year Plan(1946-1953) of Abdul-Baha's Divine Plan. July 22nd was also the eve of my second birthday. On that date in 1946 the King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed by members of a Jewish terrorist organization in Palestine killing 91 people. Shoghi Effendi made no mention of this event in the massive compendium of his published letters to the various countries of the world. In the previous year, though, Shoghi Effendi wrote two of the longest letters of his ministry, some 8000 and 12,000 words, letters which defined the nature, direction, the history and the future of the then embryonic Baha’i community of North America, a community that had just completed the first half century of its history: 1892-1942. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)Shoghi Effendi, “Letter to American Baha’is, July 20th, 1946,” Messages to America: 1932-1946, Wilmette, 1947, p.105; and (2)ABC TV, “The Big Picture: The Age of Terror,” August 13th, 2003: 8:30-9:30 pm.

I was just turning two, then,
back in '46 when terrorism had
just unleashed its first savage
blows and His Plan had just begun
its 2nd stage completely unbeknownst(1)
to anyone in my small world and in most
of the small worlds of everyone else,too.

His successor was turning, always turning
his mind to the needs of the Plan,a Cause,
a community,creating as he did a portrait
coloured and enriched by his subtle vision
of history, history as a performance that
was enacted before a divine audience by
ordinary mortals with a plot and script
composed by Providence and played out by
those same mortals on a stage that was their
lives. Always there was fidelity to that script
when attempting to set in motion those actors,
one of whom became me back in that 3rd stage.(2)

(1) 1946-1953
(2) 1953-1963

Ron Price
15 August 2003

THOSE MINARETTES OF THE WEST

Today we all witnessed on our television screens the collapse of the twin-towers of the World Trade Building. Thousands were killed and another eight-hundred in the Pentagon when a jet crashed into its centre. The heart of America's military and industrial complex shattered in the most savage act of terrorism in American history. This poem is an attempt to make some sense, to express some understanding of the tragedy that occurred.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 12 Sept 2001.

He called them minarets
with such gentle irony
that we nearly missed His point.

I'm sure He knew they would
come crashing down upon our heads
as our civilization was to come
undone in the years, the decades,
perhaps, centuries ahead....

For those time-honoured
and powerful strongholds
of orthodoxy, political
and religious, can not save us....

And this military and industrial
complex, blown apart in front of our
eyes one-hundred-and-twelve days
after the Opening of the Terraces.

Is there any connection, Horace?(1)
You always said: religion is cause
and history is effect in a tortured
interaction just about beyond reason.

It reminded me of the Kennedy
tragedy, World War II and I,
horrific events following
in rapid succession:
(i)the election of the House,
(ii)the beginning of the Plan, and
(iii)'Abdu'l-Bahás trip west,
....respectively...respectively....

(1) Horace Holley, secretary of the NSA of the United States for many years and Hand of the Cause.

Ron Price 12 September 2001

SOME CURRENT ISSUES IN THE WIDER SOCIETY

Before passing on from the crises of the last two decades, crises that took place in the historical backdrop to this new paradigm, I will draw on one quotation from Shoghi Effendi written during the depression of the 1930s. He refers to "the uncertainties, the perils and the financial stringency afflicting the nation" and the need for the continuous and abundant flow of funds; he emphasizes in that same letter to LSAs that they "desist from insisting too rigidly on the minor observances and beliefs which might prove a stumbling- block in the way of any sincere applicant." This letter could very well have been written with the same sentiments by the House of Justice in the recent years of the international financial crisis and in these years as the Cause became more open to people outside the Cause, more inclusive in its orientation and necessarily more flexible in setting out the qualifications for membership with an emphasis, not a new emphasis in many ways, on gradually winning over those who become Bahais to the unreserved acceptance of whatever has been ordained in its teachings.

There have been many issues which have come to a head in the wider world in these early years of this new paradigm, arguably the first years of community building in the international Bahai community. Many of these issues are highly complex. The global financial crisis, several crises associated with global terrorism, as well as climate change and global warming are but three apposite examples. I will comment briefly here on the latter. In 1997 the Kyoto Protocol set binding targets for greenhouse gas reductions by industrialised nations of 5% against 1990 levels, over the five-year period 2008-2012. Globally 1998 was the warmest year ever recorded, enhanced by a strong El-Niño. The IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the World Meteorological Organization and United Nations Environment Programme, stated in 2001 that most of the warming over the last 50 years was, with at least a 66% probability, to have been caused by man-made greenhouse gases. This was its strongest statement to date on man's contribution to climate change. In 2003 Europe experienced its worst heatwave in 500 years leading to an estimated 30,000 additional deaths.

A separate book could be written on this and other controversial issues of the last two decades, on the many technological and scientific developments, some of which amount to virtual paradigm changes in various fields of communication, astronomy and the several physical and biological sciences--to say nothing of the several humanities disciplines. In the quixotic and unpredictable tournament surrounding events in the sociopolitical world there are often seismic shifts in priorities as the world continues to confront the unprecededed and unpredictable tempest of our times. This book does not attempt any minute and detailed analysis of subjects which have been and now are at the forefront of general discussion in the print and electronic media and which act as a backdrop for this Bahai paradigm in the wider global world. The House of Justice and the ITC also tend to avoid discussing any specific controversial social issue in their major messages and letters to the Bahais of the world.

A project taking place at The European Organization for Nuclear Research successfully circulated two beams each with a power of 3.5 trillion electron volts. The engineers then lined-up two beams so that they smashed into each other. This was like "firing two needles across the Atlantic and getting them to hit each other" according to the main engineer Steve Myers, director for accelerators and technology at this Swiss laboratory. On the 30th of March 2010 two proton particle beams smashed into each other. They were travelling at 3.5 trillion electron volts(TeV) with a resultant force of 7 TeV. At the moment we only have a general knowledge of about 5 per cent of the universe and this new project may open up the other 95 per cent. This is just a taste of paradigmatic shifts from the world of physics.

This book does not discuss the complex issue of political non-involvement which is the substantive position of the Bahai community on partisan sociopolitical issues. The major Bahai institutions pick this issue up in separate letters when appropriate but leave this matter, for the most part, out of their major communications with the Bahai community. These institutions have made the Bahai position clear in message after message over the decades as the Guardian did before them and, again for the most part, they have no need to reiterate the Bahai position on politics yet again. Bahais are to rise above partisanship and particularism, the transient passions and petty calculations, and the inevitable entanglements and bickerings inseparable from the pursuits of the politician. This book will say no more about the relation of this new paradigm to these issues. The House of Justice will provide the necessary guidance over time to apply this principle to existing circumstances.(Bahai Canada, October 2009).

FREEDOM OF THOUGHT AND INDIVIDUAL INITIATIVE

This Faith attaches a great deal of importance to freedom and initiative and to the interpretation of its texts, its programs and its community life. If I can make but a small contribution, while exercising this freedom and initiative, in assisting the bringing about of a personal, an individual, paradigm shift in the lives of some of my fellow believers across the globe, as well as my own life, a paradigm shift as important as the one in the wider Bahai community, this book will have achieved one of its central purposes. To understand this new culture, this new paradigm, students and readers will find it helpful, it seems to me, to take into account Bahai history, its teaching and practices and their unique elaboration over some 133 years: 1844 to 1996--as well as the history of the critical century before 1844 during which the stage was set for this new religion to come to its birth through, in the context of, the lives of its three main precursors. Although the Bahai Faith takes very specific positions on many issues in contemporary society, I make no secret of changing my mind on many important issues as they evolve in the popular press and the print and electronic media. I've never thought it a virtue to adopt a fixed position and then defend that position like a purveyor of some brand name. The social world is immensely complex and Bahai apologetics and hermeneutics are not like selling cornflakes, saving whales, giving money to a save the children campaign or taking more vitamin C.

I have found, in writing down my thoughts on this subject of the new Bahai culture, that I have created for myself a taking-off point and hopefully a taking-off point for readers, one that draws on many serious and complex ideas. I have experienced, as I have tried to get beyond the new language of this paradigmatic shift both personally and analytically, an auspicious beginning to my own reflections on the new paradigm, on the new culture of learning and of growth in the operational life of the Baha’i community that has begun to emerge in the last two decades. The act of writing is an effort of understanding. It is also an effort in caring. Writers write about things in which they invest their energy and care, their thought and their feelings, although this is not always the case. The famous sociologist, at least famous in some academic worlds, Richard Sennett, wrote many years ago that the clearer and more vocatively writers can write, the more they feel in touch with their subject. But writing evocatively and involving readers is easier said than done.

I feel that this book is a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, only some of them original, blend and clash. There is an intersection in these pages of many lines of thought, a pattern of intellectual diffusion and a diversity of ideas, a conflict of opinions and, hopefully, some sparks of truth. As the German theologian and philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote nearly two centuries ago:"Since each person, as an individual, is the not-being of the other, it is never possible to eliminate the non-understanding of others completely."(The Academy Addresses of 1829: On the Concept of Hermeneutics) As Bahaullah put a similar idea: there are no two souls who are both outwardly and inwardly united. Differences ofpoints of view, it is axiomatic, are with us to stay in this as in all paradigms.

This statement is a personal one and some readers may find it too personal, too self-obsessed as one reader has already put it in one of the many emails and posts I have already received on the internet. I am going to say a few words about obsession, mine and obsession in general because of its importance not only in my life and in my personal response to this new paradigm but around the world in the lives of many Bahais and in the wider culture in general. Readers of this book can easily send me feedback on this world wide web of communication if they would like to offer their comments as they have already done in the last three years. I have received many responses to what was initially an essay and is now this 200 page book. I have received both encomium and opprobrium and I'm sure these responses are but the beginning to what is the most extensive commentary on this new paradigm currently available--at least in the first 15 years of this new Bahai culture.

OBSESSIONS

Self-obsession, as I say and in those words of one of my critics, is a common problem today and I would not want to claim that I have been free of its taint during my seven decades of living. I am the first to admit to having obsessions, to being driven. Indeed, the dominating passion of teaching the Cause could be said to have been a a ruling passion, my mother and my first wife would have called it an obsession, in my life since at least 1964-5. Obsession is a word I have grown comfortable with after nearly fifty years of dealing with its results: its fascinations and glories, its tragedies and complexities, its brilliance and darknesses, its energizing and debilitating features. A commitment sensibly and insensibly came into my life in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in my teens and early twenties. In many basic ways it took over my life. Perhaps I could blame my bipolar tendencies for my obsessiveness.

It has always been and still is important, though, that this obsession with teaching and the Bahai Faith, did not appear to be an obvious one in the public domain. Teaching is one important component of my Bahai life and that Bahai life is, indeed, my life. I have always, at least since those early sixties, seen both the Bahai Faith and teaching as crucial to my role in life, indeed, to my very existence. It became over the decades a significant part of my very raison d'etre my modus vivendi to use a Latin expression. The context for the expression of this Cause in my day-to-day life is one I have always tried to make one that was characterized by social normality, at least as far as this was possible. I have tried to look and be as many-sided and normal, as well-balanced and well-oriented, as happy and as mentally and spiritually integrated, as I have been able. Wholeness or integration, though, as Charles Fair put it in his book "The New Nonsense"(1974, p.45) is not really a goal but more of a battle--at best a balancing act, a perpetually unstable reconciliation of forces which, unreconciled, simply fear us and/or our societies to pieces...We tend to see inner conflict as a clinical disorder when in fact it is almost a first law of inner psychic life." This has certainly been the case for me, although not 24/7 and not every decade from my childhood to late adulthood. My life is far too complex to reduce it, to explain it, in terms of my BPD.

This balancing-act, as Fair puts it, this reconciliating of forces, has not always been easy, though, especially with my strong religious commitment, with my bi-polar disorder as well living in a society obsessed with many different things. Everyone has their own life-trajectories, involving as they do a pantheon of obsessions: sport, gardening, media, job, family, sex, fun and cleaning among a long list of other obsessions and compulsions. Obsession by the 1990s, as one prominent writer put it, became both a dreaded disease and a noble and desireable cultural goal and endeavour. Indeed, it is seen as necessary for those who have a commitment and who act in the context of some personally motivating metanarrative which underpins their day-to-day lives. Such people need to be highly focussed and preoccupied with what the French call their idees fixe.

Obsession is paradoxical and can generate tragedy and despair. It has a dark, pathological, side which society is all-too-familiar with, a side which is: dangerous, fanatical, very intense, filled with quiet or not-so-quiet desperation, characterised by various forms of compulsion and is now a much more common medical problem requiring diagnosis and treatment. It is something that makes a person literally possessed, not by the devil as was said for centuries, but by some complex combination of internal and external forces. It is a common practice in psychiatry to separate obsessions (thoughts) from compulsions(practices). OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, is the name psychiatry gives to this disorder in some of its more extreme forms. There has developed an interesting literature on the subject. It is a literature which sees obsession as: (a) a disability or sin to be treated in religious terms, (b)a genetic disorder to be treated in medical terms, (c) a cultural problem to be analysed and accommodated or (d) an artistic entity to be valued. I leave this subject to readers to follow-up in their own way, if the subject interests them. I will give the final word here, not on obsession but on possession, to the French sociologist de Toqueville who wrote: "that which most vividly stirs the human heart is certainly not the quiet possession of something precious but rather the imperfectly satisfied desire to have it and the continual fear of losing it again." In this new culture of learning and growth there will be many more believers who will be characterized by that "quiet possession of something precious." This has certainly determined much of my activity as a Bahai both before this new culture of learning, during its existence thusfar and, I trust, as farasmy eye can see.(Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1831)

MY RETIREMENT IN PERSPECTIVE

Now in retirement I am not holding on by the skin of my teeth in search of an income to pay the bills and feed my family. I am not a frustrated liberal trying to fulfil some vision that has been taking a beating in recent years. Nor am I a frustrated conservative complaining about the decline in traditional values. Nor am I a Bahai discouraged by the meagre response, at least as defined by a long-awaited increase in membership, especially in Western countries, to this new Revelation. I have my frustrations and my discouragements as well as my pains and aches and readers are welcome to read about some of them if they google RonPrice BPD or if they google one of a number of other sets of words beginning with my name in their search engines. I am not backward in coming forward about my complaints, about the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that I have suffered from nor which my society or my religion have suffered from. But, for the most part, I do this commisserating at other posts, on other threads, in other essays, articles and books now on the internet: not here.

The practical affairs of my life in the years 1959 to 1999--and which can be found described on the internet at many a site with a little googling--have been a magnificent apprenticeship for the creative intellectual work of the last decade, this partially involuntary withdrawal from much of practical life. The literary tasks which I have taken up and which, in some ways, were forced upon me by circumstances, I am convinced of their rightness--as much as I have been convinced of the rightness of anything in my life--I carry out with a good deal of executive capacity, that is: (a) to the best of my power the duty which presents itself to me on a daily basis and (b) using the skills I have acquired in life through self-education and self-discipline which require that I do something with both these skills, this discipline and this knowledge. All of this is, for me, a triumph of intellectual purposiveness over intellectual dissipation and a disciplined use of time.

My literary schemes have come to take ever more powerful hold upon my imagination during these new years of this culture of learning and growth. They are my consuming passion, my obsession, my commitment, now that I am not tightly chained to the world of job, endless conversations and socializing, meetings and community responsibilities. The intellectual and literary objectives I pursue, I do so at a steadfast pace, not unlike the tortoise's slow but sure gait, dealing as I must with the soporific effects of a bipolar disorder and the inevitable demands of simply living and keeping body and soul together in relationships with others especially my wife, my family and my community.

By forming internet relationships with Marxists, atheists, radical feminists, agnostics, Muslims, among so many others of different religious and philosophical persuasions I'm not just refuting arguments, I'm responding to people who, in the end, have come to occupy some degree of relationship that is hopefully positive. One could call them by many terms: friends, associations, mutual discussants. The internet provides a great opportunity to break out of our isolated bubbles and go out and put a personal face on those we disagree with. Some call this personalism. When we get to know those we disagree with, whether it’s about faith, politics or anything else, we are far more likely to attempt to understand them before we coldly demonize them from afar. The process tends to build communion. This can open minds and allow the Holy Spirit to work miracles. And that is no simple task.

So much of my internet work is about apologetics, but I have no time for polemicism. I like to see all the commentators as people around the after-dinner table having more tea or coffee or an extra helping of dessert. This is a New Apologetics and it must be the apologetics of love and cooperation, not enmity and confrontation. Hence it must also be a dialogical apologetics. Dialogue is what I do now for my spiritual bread and butter. I love to make connections with people who have different ideas to me - as long as they are really interested in searching for the truth and living by it that is. I would rather spend time in conversation with a Buddhist, or an Atheist, or a Muslim or a Feminist who actually seriously is seeking the essential things of life, than with someone who has no interest at all in reflecting upon their life and its meaning and what it means to live and to die well. In my internet work and in my leisure, I have become les interested in winning arguments and more interested in responding to human beings.

THE FIRST 15 YEARS OF THIS PARADIGM IN PERSPECTIVE

The historical record of the last 15 years, the Bahai experience of this new paradigm and its factual base as it exists for me, as I write this book, is a congeries of contiguously related fragments. I put these fragments together to make a whole of both a particular and of a general kind. These fragments are put together in similar ways to those that novelists use to put together figments of their imaginations to display their creative and ordered worlds, their cosmos, their cosmology, where only disorder, chaos or, indeed, nothingless might appear if they had not put pen to paper. As I write I create some order, some of my cosmology and some hopefully useful words about this new paradigm for others to read. And I write to get my own house in order. The path on which the Bahai community advances is wide--very wide--as Lample emphasizes on the last page of his analysis of the first several years of the Bahai experience of this new paradigm. There is a place for me in this paradigm and a place for all Bahais. The community must avoid, though--and these are Lample's final words of advice as the Bahai community entered the final year of the first Four Year Plan(1996-2000)within this new paradigm--the extremes of fundamentalism and relativism, conservatism and liberalism, extreme orthodoxy and irresponsible freedom. Interpreting the meaning of the teachings in a literal way leading to rigid practice on the one hand; or having such a relativistic perspective that anything is seen as an appropriate course in a Bahai life; or, again, possessing an extreme orthodoxy, an exaggerated conviction in the validity of one's grasp of the truth--these are all dangers that we as Bahais must avoid if we are to walk the path of progress and unity. And let there be no mistake. This path is not an easy one, ridden as that path is with the many pressures that exist on the lives of those who try to walk the walk and talk the talk. The Bahai life is no tea party inspite of what are often appearances to the contrary.

The future for the Bahai, and certainly this Bahai, in these years of the new millennium and this new paradigm has never looked so bright. Of course, I can not speak for all the millions of Bahais. Each person has and will have their own story. Some of my story is found in this book. This piece of writing which began as a relatively short essay right after reading an essay on a similar theme by Moojan Momen(A Change of Culture, 2004) nearly three years ago in the spring of 2007 has become, by degrees, over these last 32 months a book of 420 pages. This analysis, this description, this account, does not assume an adversarial attitude to the developments in the Cause since 1996 as has often been and still is the case especially on the internet, with analyses and comments about these new developments in the international Bahai community; it attempts to give birth of as fine an etiquette of expression and as acute an analysis as I can muster. I like to think that this book puts into practice both candour and critical thought on the one hand and praise and delight at the several processes within this new paradigm on the other. I invite readers to what I also like to think is a context on which relevant fundamental questions regarding this new paradigm may be discussed within the Baha’i community.

SOME THOUGHTS ON COMMUNICATION AND CONFLICT

There are a multitude of manifestations of a general cultural orientation toward clash, controversy and argument. To put this more simply: we all see and experience conflict and controversy differently. The way people talk with one another in social situations offers an insightful analysis of the trend toward argument and its consequences in any set of relationships. There is and has been an emphasis on clashing and individual rights rather than common ground and reasonable compromise within our larger culture, a culture that privileges and rewards on the basis of that emphasis. Programs do better in television ratings, for example, if there is some clash and loud arguement rather than quiet talking heads. The lack of mainstream popularity for less incendiary television talk hosts and discussions is testament to the role that combative communication and clash play in popular media. There is also a strong tendency in much public discourse to the use of humour and, while this is often entertaining, it often masks the essential complexity of many issues. While this new Bahai paradigm encourages candid and critical thought, encourages the use of humour in consultation as a marvellous device for releasing tension and also tries to stimulate the brilliant inventiveness that is so necessary in truly effective consultation, this book also aims to avoid dissention which is a moral and intellectual contradiction to those who would be peacemakers among the children of men(UHJ, 29/12/88).

I would argue, with the sociologist Jurgen Habermas in terms of communication in general, that Bahai consultation in this new paradigm, has two central features. The first is communication that is oriented toward reaching understanding such as common definitions that would inform consensual action. The second is communication that concerns consensual action. Consensual action assumes a common set of definitions of the situation and then moves toward what can collectively be done in response(Habermas 1979, p.209). Participants, in this context, must have equal opportunity to initiate and continue communicative acts. Participants must have equal opportunity to present arguments, explanations, interpretations and justifications; no significant opinions should go unexamined. Participants must have equal opportunity to honestly express personal intentions, feelings and attitudes. And finally, participants must have equal opportunity to present directive statements that serve to forbid, permit and command. If each participant in the dialogue lives out these assumptions then fair turn-taking may occur. The ability to question the “common sense” and assumed values of others must be freely allowed without defensiveness, and concessions and compromises can be offered without feeling “vulnerable” to the opposition. Such a consultative orientation or set of goals has been present in previous Bahai paradigms, but they are goals which require continued effort to achieve on the part of Bahais the world over as the Bahai community becomes a much larger one in these years and decades ahead. To achieve an etiquette of expression and civility on the one hand and a critical and candid expression of views on the other is not an easy achievement. The potentiality for this goal, this etiquette of expression, to use a term the House used in a letter to the Bahais of the USA over 20 years ago, needs to be actualized more and more if Bahai consultations are to be characterized by both frankness and civility.

These goals are ideals that are best understood as hypotheticals to be strived for rather than things easily achieved. Communicative competence operates within this framework of goals and is a more achievable set of characteristics for an individual communicator to acquire and enact. The competent communicator, again drawing on Habermas(1979), can engage in communicative action that pursues truth. One might imagine this as the next step in creating understanding and moving forward toward consensual solutions. Various constraints on democratic communication must be eliminated in order to produce rational outcomes; communication competence addresses internal abilities and choices by individual participants. The communicator must have command of the basic structures of language and purpose of communication. The competent communicator also must be a competent thinker and be able to put such thoughts into expression in rhetorically effective ways without invoking harmful rhetorical techniques that are associated with what he calls strategic communication—communication intended to persuade through manipulation. This seems like a rather minimal standard upon first glance. The analytical implications, though, suggest that a competent communicator should be able to analyze discourse at several levels. These levels include sensitivity to the general limitations of language and expression such as: (a) the struggle to communicate ideas that defy easy expression, as well as (b) specific situational constraints such as specific relations between communicators and thinking through the implications of the assertions being made (e.g., “what if this is really true?”).

Most of the above concepts can be understood as diagnostic in focus. They are useful for clarifying problems, but the solutions are complex because they require behavioural and interpersonal skills that are often, if not usually, lacking among the participants. The concepts above do point generally toward a direction of healthy discourse but they are filled with specific behaviours or ideas that need to be embraced and put into practice when talking with others in groups. When the social worlds of individuals collide, each person finds that the words of others often constitute a repudiation of that which he or she holds most dear. The results are familiar patterns of reciprocated diatribe in which each side rudely tells the other what is wrong with it. Useful discussion of the ostensible issues becomes a casualty of the bickering.

It is crucial in this new paradigm to avoid such casuistry, but it is not easy. Both sides in what could be called "verbal wars” see the other as aggressors. Such views are based on a large set of assumptions. “Liberals” are fighting the good fight against historically oppressive voices of tradition. “Conservatives” are fighting the good fight against historically rebellious voices of unbridled liberalism. Moral conflicts are made more complex because participants clash from unique social worlds with distinct values and rules. Because ways of dealing with conflicts are a part of one’s social world, when these conflicts do occur, they lack a common procedure for dealing with them. Actions taken by one side to be good, true, or prudent, are often perceived by the other as evil, false, or foolish—perhaps even sinister and duplicitous. The intensity of moral conflicts is fueled when such actions are treated as malicious or stupid by the other side.

Ethicist Martin Buber(1971) stressed the need to emphasize the strong ties between participants in a conflict. He focused on the quality of their relationship rather than the pattern of choices and outcomes. He suggested that participants examine the mutual effects on the relationship between the participants in the conflict when evaluating various communication options. Communication theorist Walter Fisher (1986) suggests that we can assess the quality of an argument by asking about the character of the audience that would believe and act on it. Buber parallels this by suggesting that we can assess the quality of our process of argumentation by examining the quality of relationships it fosters among the participants. I could go on and on with this sort of communication analysis and in this new paradigm there will be much discussion on the necessary communication skills to produce effective and efficient action. For now, though, I leave this complex subject with the most recent passage from the House on this subject: "Learning as a mode of operation requires that all assume a posture of humility" and they go on to emphasize among other things insofar as human relations are concerned that we should delight "not so much in our own accomplishments but in the progress and service of others." I leave this subject now to readers to take in directions they desire and directions they will require as this paradigm is put into increasing practice in the years ahead.

UPDATING THIS BOOK

It is my intention to update this literary sojourn in the months and years ahead as the current Five year Plan comes to its conclusion in 2011 and in the decade beyond as the first century of this Faith's Formative Age comes to its end in 2021. One of the advantages of this BLO site where this article is placed and to which I often refer my other internet posts and my cyberspace readers, is the freedom it gives to writers to update their articles and books, whatever they write on the site in what is in reality a continuous editing process. These updates in the months and years ahead will be part of an ongoing exercise as new insights from major and minor published and unpublished writers who are Bahais, and the writings of those from other interest groups who post on the internet, become available. Information and analyses, quotations and ideas, from the elected and appointed institutions of the Cause in the last 15 years and the next 15 years: the last twelve months (21/4/10-21/4/11) of the current Five Year Plan(2006-2011) and especially future years, the two Five Year Plans(2011-2016 and 2016-2021) up to the end, as I say, of the first century of the Formative Age in 2021 and beyond, will also embellish future editions of what may very well become a very large book or series of volumes, with their, as yet, unwritten communications.

Much has already been written about this new paradigm and much will be written perhaps too much, in all likelihood, for the average person to synthesize. But burgeonings of print are a reality of contemporary society and everyone must work out their own response to this complexity, this swim in printed matter, a response that suits their talents, their interests and their circumstances. Each of us only works this problem out to an extent; each of us experiences a certain intellectual dyspepsia given the information overload we must contend with if we want to engage with the issues of our time. As the burgeoning of print hits us all there is a coextensive burgeoning of audio-visual, of electronic, media for our eyes and minds to deal with. Often the eye is quicker than the mind and the flashes that come at us daily on billions of screens make longer periods of concentration on print more difficult, at least for some, perhaps for billions, of viewers. But, again, this issue of learning via print and learning via electronic media and a range of issues relating to literacy and understanding are too complex to deal with in this broad survey of this new Bahai paradigm.

In some ways this book of 420 pages is really a long essay. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something I am writing to try to figure something out. Figure out something I don't yet know. I don't begin with a thesis; I don't have a fixed and final view; I don't have one now and I may never have one. This essay doesn't begin with a statement, a fixed position, but with a question, a series of questions and with many analytical and descriptive, informative and factual statements. Some of all this will be or will seem to be facts and some will just be the musings of a 65 year old Bahai who is on a pension, who goes for walks every day and who is taking a rest from extensive human interaction after fifty years of membership in a community and a religion he joined back in the 1950s. His membership and his activity kept him as busy as a beaver at times, wore him out at others and stimulated his sensory, intellectual and spiritual emporiums at still others.

CREATING OUR OWN WORLD: THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY

People create their social and cultural world through their everyday actions and interactions as several theories in the social sciences argue. Everyday practices of ordinary people are the effective tools that make supposedly passive users behave as active subjects. This new paradigm provides a very wide activity-menu for individuals in the Bahai community to chose their own particular system of production, activity and interaction. As social actors they each and all invent and create, moment by moment, the meaning and functions of things that circulate in their social space. They develop their own tactics and follow paths in often unforeseen and unpredictable ways. These approaches to social and community life and its varied phenomena share a theoretical assumption that it is the strength of human agency and subject intentionality that is the crucial factor in making the context and meaning of the dimensions of the world that people inhabit. The material features of our everyday life contexts are more than an inert background for culture construction. And let there be no mistake: this new paradigm is itself a background for culture construction and especially our own personal culture construction.

LET'S GET GOING WITH THIS PARADIGM, EH?

What, then, is this new culture of learning and growth, this new paradigm in the Bahai community? Read on, dear reader, you still have 100,000 words left to read. Be patient: little by little and minute by minute it shall be revealed but only in part, only from a wide-angled lens, from a personalized perspective. You have no need for more of the factual basis of this paradigm. The factual basis, the details of its organization and all its parts and processes can be found in many other places on the internet, in letters from the institutions of the Cause and in books and pamphlets. As I say, I'm not taking a position of evaluation and defending it; I'm not providing a potted summary of its content. I'm polishing ideas not finishing them. I notice things, a door that's ajar, a window that's open and I open it; perhaps I walk in to see what's inside; perhaps I just look out the window into my wife's garden and across the street here in Australia's oldest town. I do this in my study here on the north coast of Tasmania virtually everyday and I do this in part and at least here to create what I hope is a book that will be of some value to readers who chance by its contents here at BLO.

I must confess to an extensive rummaging and foraging about in the Bahai writings for quotations that please me and I carry them back, like a bird with its seeds, to this book, to what has become by a long series of posts and revisions here at BLO a 200 page book. I also forage about in the cultures of learning and growth outside the Bahai community. Learning and growth are abstract and concrete entities which many, indeed, myriad organizations and cultures are "into." Learning and growth are both massive, enormous, burgeoning, industries across the planet. My foraging exercises also take me into the context of my own life and the life of my society in a host of ways. I try to connect both my life and my society to this new paradigm. Foraging, of course, has been part of human society depending as it does on a combination of hunting, fishing and gathering wild foods for subsistence for hundreds of thousands of years. Until about 11,000–12,000 years ago all peoples on the planet were foragers and some still practice this ancient form of social organization. It is an ancient practice with many modern variants one of which takes places in our print-oriented culture by votaries of many causes, many movements, many volunteer organizations and literally billions of people in search of the modern equivalents of those products of hunting and fishing and searching for wild foods that occupied our ancestors for most of our existence as homo sapiens sapiens.

Perhaps I have bitten off too big a bite, too much content. Perhaps I won't get it all chewed, won't get it all masticated and digested. Sometimes a proper mastication of ones food takes longer than one is prepared to take and one suffers later from indigestion. Some food can not be masticated due to dental problems, the bad taste of the food, the toughness of the meat, indeed, a host of reasons. Much of life, of society and of this new paradigm is also beyond our capacity to understand it. We can only connect with a portion of the great burgeoning mass of information coming in at us now at the speed of light. This is true of the new Bahai culture of learning and millions of other topics, subjects, disciplines and fields in the knowledge explosion set in motion, arguably, by the latest Manifestation of God for this age.

Some readers I know, and as I have already indicated above, have found my literary exercise here at BLO too much for them to chew and they have told me. One person I know, in fact, has no teeth, and there is no way he can even put my writing on his plate. Frankness is one of the many characteristics of dialogue, of participation, on the internet and it often gets one into hot water, so to speak. To such readers who find this book, this post at BLO, simply too big a read, too long, prolix as some might call it, I simply advise that they implement an exercise in skimming or scanning, find the parts that are relevant to their particular perspectives or, if the worst comes to the worse, just click me off their radar screens. I do this clicking off exercise all the time; I did it for decades long before the internet came along.

I have already reached a broad audience and that is reward enough for me in the evening of my life, in these middle years(65-75)of late adulthood as the human development theorists in psychology call the years from 60 to 80 in the human lifespan. In writing as in talking one only wins some of the time. No book, whether it is scholarly or popular, escapes the slings and arrows and the criticisms of disappointed readers, readers who are all too keen to offer their advice, their wisdoms and their many ways to improve on what they have just read. It is an inherent property of any intellectual enterprize to generate discussion, debate and criticism. That is why it is often said that "silence is golden."

SKIMMING AND SCANNING--AND SWIMMING

Having spent 50 years in classrooms, 18 as a student and 32 as a teacher, I know that a major problem, among the many, confronting readers is the length of the text. By the time readers get to this point, if indeed they get this far, they are often ready to give it all away. And so, as I say, do some skimming and scanning if you would like to get your teeth into the subject of this new paradigm as I deal with it in these pages. The skimming process contains the following key actions: reading the title and subtitle, headings, introductions, first sentences in paragraphs, key words and final paragraphs. The three general types of skimming are previewing, overviewing, and reviewing. The steps involved in the scanning process include: checking the organization of the book and forming specific questions; anticipating clue words and identifying likely answer locations; using a systematic pattern and confirming your answer. Some combination of these techniques will assist readers whose interest in the topic is minimal, whose time is limited and who find my writing style and/or approach is not their cup-of-tea, so to speak.

These skills of skimming(one of my students asked me if this meant skimping) and scanning are important ones for readers to put in place to help them deal with the great mass of literature now available on this new paradigm and, indeed, on many other topics in their life. The intellectual and the non-intellectual, print-oriented and non-print oriented readers who chance by this writing of mine on this new Bahai culture need many a skill. In this rapidly changing world upskilling, reskilling, retuning, refining one's abilities is a constant exercise. We all need to be multi-skilled these days and I wish you well, dear readers, in trying to get handles on the many implements in and for your learning and the cultural attainments of your mind, what may very well be the first attribute of perfection within this new paradigm. As I say, to those who have already begun to find their eyes glazing over and their minds wandering, let me advise that you just click me off your radar or send me an email, a response, a written message. I'm happy to send you smaller chunks of wisdom, wee-wisdoms from the vast compendium available. Such an act will help you engage with this book and what I like to think are some useful comments in the more than 100 pages ahead--for these are still introductory words!

FEEDBACK ALREADY RECEIVED

This article or book has received many thousands of clicks in the nearly three years(9/07-9/10) of its posting, but I'm sure many readers and clickers have come and gone from its contents as quickly as the twinkling of an eye or shortly after that twinkle, that first click. I began my writing before the international financial crisis. Much has happened since I started this exercise in analysis. This post at BLO and at the several internet sites where I have placed all or part of this book of 420 pages has attracted a good deal of attention for several reasons not the least of which is that it appears to be the most lengthy statement on this new paradigm that is currently available.

As much as I would like to think there is something original here, I must acknowledge a tension between the many forms of received knowledge in the form of quotations and the ideas of others and my efforts to make the knowledge and wisdom, the facts and fancies, of others part of my own intellectual fibre. Fibre in one's breakfast food, like fibre in print needs to be ingested, digested, assimilated, assiduously examined and interpreted. I must bring some form or system or, to be more honest, some non-system into existence as I write in order to transmute all this stuff into purest gold or, as is more often the case, base metal. Sometimes this transmutation takes place largely as a result of a sprinkling process and at other times this transmutation of the ideas and writing of others takes place in a deep and sensitive process of steeping--like making a strong tea or engaging in the often lengthy process of dying cloth. Then there is a subsequent regurgitation, hopefully in a form that pleases readers. One can hope.

CREATIVE SOLUTIONS AND DOGMA

I seek creative solutions and try to avoid dogmatic assertions about the Cause and this new paradigm. But dogma is difficult to avoid as many readers and writers and people in all walks of life find today even while they are assiduously trying to avoid being dogmatic. In a religion like the Bahai Faith it is really impossible not to be dogmatic or to put the case more accurately, not to engage in an exercise of dogmatics. The truths of Bahai dogma are perennial, or so I would argue, rather than being archaic. The study of Bahai dogmatics is still in the early days even after a century and a half or, perhaps more accurately, about three decades at the most, of its development. This field, this discipline of dogmatics, is still in its early days like so many aspects of the study of this new Cause. Perhaps, as I say above, readers can simply read and take from this book what they like and integrate or incorporate what they read, what catches their fancy and their tastes, into their own frameworks for action. Keep in mind, as you go about selecting what action you want to take in this new paradigm, the following two aphorisms. The first is from the former US President Harry S. Truman: “Actions are the seed of fate, deeds grow into destiny," The second clever turn of phrase I want to insert here, I hope in a timely fashion for readers, is found in the voluminous writings of psychologist William James. It is one of his many pithy sentences: "Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does."

In my own selective use of quotations from Bahai and non-Bahai texts I attempt to integrate as I go along. I incorporate them when I can and I incorporate what I can into my own life and whatever sense of destiny I can sense from within life's mysterious dispensations that come often unbeknowst from the hand of Providence. The process seems, as I look back over the decades, to be lifelong, at least since my first contact with this Cause back in 1953, a point coincidentally of paradigmatic change of some significance in the first two centuries of Bahai history. It was a point that in some ways had nothing to do with me and everything to do with significant developments in the then culture of learning and growth in the Bahai community when this Faith spread to some 100 countries of the world in the first year of the Ten Year Crusade.

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A CULTURE OF LEARNING AND GROWTH

For there has always been a culture of learning and growth in the Bahai community. Culture is not a set of ideas imposed but a set of ideas and symbols available for use. The symbols and ideas in this new paradigm have been shifted from their former shapes and designs. Individuals in the last dozen years or so select the meanings they need for particular purposes and occasions within this new paradigm, from what seems to me to be a more extensive menu, from the varied cultural menu that their given cluster, their given local Bahai community and the wider society provides. Once the human resources in a cluster are in sufficient abundance, the House emphasized as recently as April 2010, "and the pattern of growth firmly established, the community's engagement with society can, and indeed must, increase." In this view of culture, culture is seen as a resource for social action more than a structure to limit social action. This is but one of the dozens of definitions of culture and I found it in Michael Schudson's 2002 article: “How Culture Works: Perspectives from Media Studies on the Efficacy of Symbols,” pp. 141-148 in Cultural Sociology, edited by Lyn Spillman Oxford, UK, Blackwell Publishers. I could select half a dozen other definitions of culture and procede to draw on their relevance to this new paradigm but such an exercise would be repetitive and would lead to prolixity of theme and content.

PUTTING IDEAS IN WRITING

Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays and books I only thought of when I sat down to write them or I take stuff I have chewed over many times but want to spit it out, want to separate the wheat from the chaff to use one of many possible metaphors to describe, to hint at, the process involved. That's why I write them. In the things people write in school one is, in theory, explaining oneself to the reader, the teacher. In a real essay or book, certainly in this one that I am writing, I'm writing primarily for myself and only secondarily for readers. I'm thinking out loud, although not exactly. Just as inviting people over to your home forces you, or at least some people, to clean up your lounge-room, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well or as least to try and present a surface of solid thinking even if, underneath, the thinking is not as solid as you'd like to think or that others you want to persuade may be persuaded to think.

All analysis is to some extent autobiographical. The only civilized form of autobiography and the accompanying description of community life that such an autobiography like mine or indeed anyone else’s that I might want to read might contain, is not the one that deals with life’s events, but with life’s thoughts; not with life’s physical accidents, deeds or circumstances but with spiritual moods and the imaginative passions of the mind. I thank the American poet John Ashberry(Modern Critical Reviews, Harold Bloom, editor, Chelsea House Publishers, 1985, p.217) for what for me was the brilliant inventiveness of this idea and which, however brilliant, does not contain all the truth on the subject of thought and the action behind thought. But Ashberry's words go far to help us all understand some of the complexities that are part of our lot as we go about dealing with some of the enigmas, the contradictions, the paradoxes and the conflicts in our individual and community existence on the path that has attempted, is attempting and will attempt to implement this new paradigm.

Although I would like to please as many readers with this exposition as possible I write primarily, as I have said above, to please myself and to please those of the reading public who share some of my tastes and some of my limitations, some of my cosmology and some of my very raison d'etre. "How do I know what I think until I see what I've said," goes one of the popular sentences that tries to capture one of the major purposes of the process of writing and talking. Much of what I write has developed due to paths not anticipated at the start, but which opened up under the pressure of the spark of the differing opinions I had from others in my community. These paths also opened up due to my desire to circle around and meander, to muse with intent and to polish, to hone and think out loud.

I aim to be as coherent as I can possibly be regarding a precise statement of the contribution: (a)I have played, (b) I now play and (c) I can, hope or may play in the ongoing story of the growth and development of the Bahai Faith over four epochs. Often there is little I can do to determine what actions others take on within this new paradigm, but there is much that I can do. As Shoghi Effendi emphasized so succinctly many decades ago: all the problems in life, in the end, lie within the individual. I have quite enough, problems that is, to keep me busy until the end of my days. And you?

There is here no definitive procedure of analysis as I go about laying a line of words, no detailed and accurate picture nor searching criticism of this new paradigm of opportunity, of previous paradigm shifts in this Faith or shifts in my life and society. I have visited this subject day after day for a period of two and one half years now(9/07-3/10), trying to gain some mastery over a subject I had been chewing over and playing with in my mind for several years before the writing, from the late years of the twentieth century and into the early years of this new millennium after it burst upon us in 2001.

Some readers will find my perspectives far too personal, idiosyncratic, opinionated and, as I say above, self-obsessed, not dealing as objectively and analytically, not dealing in as distanced and impersonal a way, with the new paradigm as a book of this nature should do for its readership as these readers suggest. Much of this book is, as I say in the title, "a contemporary text and a personal context." I am working out as I go along what contribution I have made, am making and intend to make to this new paradigm. And I want readers to do the same as they travel with me in this literary journey through the labyrinth of this new paradigm. Use this book, if you come to see it as useful as you read on, come to see it as helpful: as a sort of sifter, shape-sifter, matrix, mirror, evaluation mechanism, tool, instrument, means of appraisal, appraisement or assessment, as a way to calculate or estimate, guesstimate, interpret, voice your opinion, rate, take stock of and work out your own role in this new paradigm.

Some readers I'm sure will find my analysis, my lengthy statement here at BLO but an extension of what they already see as an endless circular debate with its countless calls to action. Such readers will, in all likelihood, tire in the first several paragraphs. Many will not have even read this far and will have clicked me off earlier in this exposition. For many readers exhaustive and extensive analysis dulls their understanding of the subject until, finally, teaching is something addressed merely in terms of sales techniques, the implementation of some simple formula, some handle they use to make a beginning and continue their work. We each have our own way of dealing with the call to teach and I am not trying to twist anyone's arm, although I do some twisting of my own as I go along. Working out one's own path is no easy trick, no easy ride. Even as the House mentioned just this month in April 2010: "there are no shortcuts, no formulas."

There have been and there will be many other readers, though, for whom this book will be what I have intended that it should be: an extension of their own analysis and thoughts. I have received much feedback thanking me for this book, this contribution to the discussion of the new culture of growth in the Bahai community. There is very little in the way of any extended commentary on what might be called the literary-literature industry on this new paradigm. There are now many thousands of posts, of threads, of letters, of newsletters, of magazines, of internet sites, to say nothing of the mountains of verbal analysis at endless meetings all over the globe at all levels of Bahai administration and community activity. There are short digests and short summaries, brief critiques and commentaries as well as letters and reports filled to overflowing with what now amount to literally 1000s of pages of resources for the would-be student of this new Bahai culture. But there is nothing as extended and in one place at this 420 page book, at least as far as I know. I'm sure this will change in the years ahead for these are still early days.

Readers who would like to study some of the commentary that has been generated in the first two decades of the implementation of this new paradigm are advised to read:
(i) the Universal House of Justice Ridvan messages from 1996 to 2011. They can be found at Bahai Library Online;
(ii)several reports of the NSAs of the Bahais of the USA, Canada, and other national Bahai communities which are available on line with a little googling;
(iii) posts at the internet site Reaching and Teaching Efforts for a broad context for Bahai activity especially in the last 15 years: 1996 to 2011;
(iv)Learning and the Evolution of the Bahai Community, a talk by Paul Lample given in 2008;
(v) Revelation and Social Reality, Palabra Pub., 2009, Paul Pample; and
(vi)much else with some ingenuity and online googling by readers with a desire to keep up-to-date on the many resources that come out month after month, resources generated by the elected and appointed arms of the Bahai Faith, by individuals and institutions of the Cause around the world.

SOME HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS

If I was to compare where we are in this paradigm shift to where we were in the shift instituted by the Guardian in those entre deux guerres years of the 1920s and 1930s, 2011 as the 15th year after the inception of this paradigm shift would be the equivalent of the year 1936/7 which was the 15th year of the paradigm shift instituted by Shoghi Effendi. In 1936/7 the Bahai community of the USA began to put its first systematic teaching Plan on paper and put it into action. It was the year that the dome of the temple in Chicago was completed. It was the first year of the first major teaching Plan: 1937-1944. Little did the Bahai community in the USA know what was ahead of them in that paradigm. Little, it might be added, do we now know what is ahead of us in this one.

If I were to compare where we are in this paradigm with where we were in the Bahai paradigm of, say, 1863 to 1921, I might be inclined to say we are about in the same time-frame as that in which Abdul-Baha was returning home from His tour of the West. By 1914, that initial paradigmatic timeframe of 1844 to 1914, a seventy-year period, this new Faith and its precursor, the Babi Faith, had suffered an estimated 25,000 deaths, a blood-bath of slaughter, in Iran. Gibbon says that the Christians have "grotesquely exaggerated" the scale of the persecutions they suffered under the Roman empire. If anything, the Bahai community has underplayed the narrative of the horrors of the persecution the Iranian Bahai community has experienced. The Babi-Bahai story has been drowned somewhat in the sea of suffering in which humanity has been embroiled since the 19th century. I leave it to readers to play with the many possible Bahai paradigms and timeframes, epochs and stages, phases and periods of the more than two centuries since the birth of Bahaullah and the Bab.

TEACHING THE CAUSE

Individuals often tire of the subject of teaching and retreat into gardening, television, sport, family activity and a wide range of leisure-time pursuits. One can not blame them given the discouragingly meagre response in the last several decades in many countries to their teaching initiatives. And there is nothing wrong with these pervasive pastimes, endeavours and occupations which enrich one's daily life. Teaching the Cause has never been easy especially in the direct sense as the Bahais are often asked to do in this new paradigm. Even the indirect sense when carried out, carried on, in one's life over the decades of the lifespan requires persistence and dedication, vision and patience as well as more qualities than most of us possess and that are not easy to come by and to exemplify, day after day, year after year, from our youth into our old age, if we last that long! But the indirect approach often takes some of the heat out of what would have been the unsuccessful evangelism of direct teaching especially in the more secularized of societies to say nothing of the more fundamentalist.

Bahá’í community life can be, often is--and often is not--a distinctive pattern of action transforming spiritual, social and administrative affairs. Disassociated from its mission and its vision, though, it can and does deteriorate into frustrating meetings and consultations on trivial and hair-splitting concerns. This has been the experience of many in the last several decades. Indeed, I'm sure this has characterized participation in community life for many thousands of believers for decades before these recent epochs and far back into the 19th century. For thousands of those who came in touch with the transforming power of the Cause little transforming took place. The Bahai Faith is not like a rabbit's root or Niagara Falls. It's not some magic bullet or open-sesame. Not everyone gets transformed. When tests come hard and fast which they seem inevitably to do, the crucible of transformation yields an array of results from exit narratives to people whose lives are utterly transformed by this Cause.

As one noted writer once put it commenting on the forty years of Bahaullahs ministry, 1863-1892: the greatest tragedy of the life of this Great Soul was that most of those who did come in touch with Him, with this immense spiritual Force, did not join this new Cause. And those that did join this new Faith did not become saints overnight, endowed with wisdom and endless supplies of patience to deal with human eccentricities. Each generation has been tested and tried and the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon were not qualities everyone was given in ample amounts, nor are we as we travel along the way in these generations of the half-light.

In the culture of learning and growth that each generation of Bahais has found itself in--the distresses and disturbances, the heartaches and hindrances, the inconveniences and irritations--have kept everyone busy coping, each in their own way. As the Guardian wrote in God Passes By: "The process whereby the unsuspected benefits of this new Cause have been manifested to the eyes of men has been slow, painfully slow." "Crises," he went on to say, "at times threaten to arrest the unfoldment of the Cause and blast all the hopes which any former progress has engendered."(p.111) This has been true for more than a century and a half. It is, therefore, not surprising that disappointment sometimes sets in the hearts of believers. That the apparently slowly crystallizing institutions and its policies are often barely understood should come as no surprise if, indeed, they are crystallizing slowly. Speed of development in this new culture is often as hard to assess as it has been in the past, in previous paradigms. Much in this Cause is in the hands of, and part of the processes involved in, those mysterious dispensations of Providence.

What I say above was true in the years of the ministry of all the Central Figures of this Faith as anyone who is more than a little familiar with Bahai history in those earlier stages of the Cause will easily confirm. In the century of the Formative Age since the passing of Abdu'l-Bahá this has also been true, a fortiori. Hopefully this analysis and comment, this historical overview, will contribute in some way or other, as I indicated above, to an inevitable and necessary dialogue on the issues regarding the many related processes involved in this latest and ongoing paradigmatic shift. It is my hope, too, that what readers find here will serve as a useful extension of their own reflections and understandings regarding the culture of learning and of growth and the paradigmatic shift the Baha’i community is currently going through and has been going through since at least the mid-1990s.

THE YEARS OF THIS PARADIGM

The impulse to ponder and try to distil: (a) the events in the Bahai community in those last fin de siecle years of the 20th century and these early years in this new millennium as well as (b) my own contribution---has led to this essayistic reflection. I invite readers to follow me into what I would like to think is a world of intellectual rigour, a world in which I preserve my distance from you and have it annihilated all at once, as one writer expressed what happens between writer and reader in the reading-writing process. I have been inviting people into my world of ideas, words and writing for decades with only a modicum of success and so I do not approach this exercise with high expectations. My assumptions and presumptions are imbued with a good dose of healthy realism and low to medium-range expectations. I approach this exercise, this relationship with you the reader, with a belief in the power of questions. The significance of questions and of what the creative writer Bahiyyih Nakhjavani calls shadow regions where questions can arise, where we see sharp contrasts between ideals and realities and where we grapple with contradictions and paradoxes--these questions and these shadows underpin much of this literary raison d'etre, my MO as the who-dun-it folk call their modus operandi, their modus vivendi.

Edward Gibbon, the great historian of the Roman empire, thought he was describing the greatest and most awful scene in the history of humankind. It is my view that our time can lay claim to being the great climacteric, the great turning point, the great paradigm shift of paradigm shifts, the greatest and most awful scene in the long climb of life on our planet. This book describes but one aspect of one chapter, one small scene, one mise-en-scene, one setting, in the great drama of our time. I have choreographed this work, brought in a team of talented people and I hope you enjoy the show, as it were. But I make no guarantees. This book is now in your hands and each reader must, will, give to my words his or her own particular meaning. Readers will give them their own 'take,' as we say these days.

SOME STATISTICS AND SOME CELEBRITIES

Though this new world religion has steadily grown over the last century, the Bahai community in western countries remains small: one twentieth of one percent of the total American population, one in one thousand in Canada, one in 1200 in Australia and I could go on and on for each western country in similarly small proportions. There are many examples of small movements' having a noticable impact on culture or religion. In the USA Unitarianism, Theosophy, and Vedantism are good examples. But for a small movement to produce a large impact on the scene in the USA, writes Robert Stockman("The American Bahai Community in the Nineties," by Robert H. Stockman, Bahai Research Office, Wilmette, Ill. Published in Dr. Timothy Miller, ed., America's Alternative Religions, SUNY Press, Albany, 1995) three conditions usually must be fulfilled. First, the movement must advocate ideas--usually a few simple ones--that resonate strongly with existing trends in the culture. Second, the movement must be able to advocate those ideas in a language that is appropriate and effective in the society outside it. Third, the movement must have articulate people or celebrities as spokespersons. These celebrities provide what is sometimes called 'charisma by association' and leading intellectual or literary figures provide an intellectual legitimacy or patina of influence in the culture.(John Travolta and Tom Cruise in Scientology are good examples) Usually the presence of the first two virtually assures the third. Of course, Stockman is addressing the experience, the retrospect and prospect of the American Bahai community and, by implication, many nations in the first, the developed, world. Other national communities in the third world and the non-English speaking world, have their own stories.

While reflecting on the relationship between celebrities and politics, sociologists David S. Meyer and Joshua Gamson concluded, "the resources that celebrities bring to bear in social movement struggles do not generally include citizen education or detailed political analysis" (Meyer and Gamson 1995, 202). In essence, few celebrities have the educational and political skills that would allow them to do sustained, in-depth and nuanced presentations. Thusfar in this new paradigm, celebrities have played no significant role as far as I know. Who knows what the future holds as the Faith expands and finds new fields of both enthusiastic support and intense opposition!

Historically, the Bahai community has rarely been able to fulfill these three requirements for influence, not in the USA and not in other countries. The basic Bahai teachings are usually expressed in a terminology that is difficult to translate into mainstream language, although this is slowly changing and some can translate the language and concepts of the Bahai idiom into a language of contemporary relevance much better than others. their books are available for all to read, for those who take any serious interest. But the Bahai literature is now immense and your average reader inside and outside this Cause simply can not keep up with the deluge. Further, the ideas, the Bahai messages, are usually part of a much larger complex of Bahai teachings and they are inextricably intertwined. One idea or theme cannot be easily separated from another. In some ways the Bahai Faith is a total package. For example, the application of the principle of interracial and interethnic unity to society is difficult because Bahai scripture prohibits Bahais from partisan political activity and breaking the law. Consequently few prominent blacks and few Civil Rights leaders have been attracted to the Bahai Faith in the more than 100 years of Bahai history in that country, in the USA(1894-2009).

The Bahai vision of a united, peaceful world, similarly, has been of limited appeal to those outside the Bahai community because the implementation of the Bahai vision cannot be established through partisan political efforts, through anti-government demonstrations and a whole plethora of activities through which many people seek to influence society, to measure their reformist zeal and their very claim to a righteous life, in the public eye. Furthermore, the Bahai conception of world unity and of interreligious relations are dominated by the belief that the new world order envisioned by the Bahai scriptures can occur only if the world accepts Bahaullah as its Lord. This is and has been far from a popular notion. It was not a popular notion in previous paradigms and it is not a popular one now. It may be some time, after many more years of Bahai experience in this new paradigm, before this staggering claim, this difficult truth, becomes a reality in the general public eye. In the meantime Bahais must avail themselves of as many means as they can of qualities that will attract the hearts of others and develop those attributes on which true happiness and greatness lie and which are elaborated on in the Bahai writings--repeatedly, time and time again. And which, I should also add, are part and parcel of the implementation of this new culture and its multi-paradigmatic emphases.

This picture of the future of the Bahai World Order and its relationship with not only the present but the future governments of the world has found its most comprehensive discussion thusfar at a thread entitled: Defending Shoghi Effendi Posted by Sen on November 22, 2009. McGlinn has devoted many years of study to this subject and the evidence of his scholarship is everywhere apparent on this thread on a quite complex subject.

History has shown that great increases in the numbers of American Bahais occur when social turmoil is high, Stockman points out. The Bahai Faith in the USA experienced large increases in the late 1960s, the 1930s, and the 1890s. If American society enters another period of turmoil, a substantial increase in Bahai numbers may occur. If, on the other hand, society remains more or less as it is now, Bahai growth is likely to remain in the range of three to five percent per year for the foreseeable future. Even at that rate the American Bahai community, Stockman estimates, is likely to reach a quarter million a half million members by 2025. With 15 years to go and with a present Bahai population of about 150 thousand it will take the most significant growth in the history of the Bahai Faith in America to occur to reach that number. This new paradigm of learning and growth in the next fifteen years will certainly be busy in achieving the numbers that Stockman has envisaged. Stockman's analysis is one I like but his analysis is but one of many and it is not the whole story. Growth is a far-too complex phenomenon to reduce it to the tri-factored hypothesis that this fine writer does in his published essay.

Here in Australia, where I have lived for four decades, the major growth factor has been the influx of Iranian refugees, their children and the birth in Australia of their children's children. There are now several generations of Iranians in Australia making up more than half of the nearly twenty thousand Bahais Downunder. I could site examples in several other countries and territories among the more than 200 in the world where Stockman's thesis is not even relevant. As I say the whole question of growth of the Bahai community across the planet is complex and multi-factorial. This new paradigm takes this multiplicity of factors into account. It does so in quite an overt and simple paradigmatic way, but also in quite a surprisingly deceptive way, a way that is difficult to penetrate, to appreciate, to see its true significance, its true outreach and impact.

It is difficult for the student of the process to get a handle on a community of six million members in a world of six billion amidst a tempest that is graphically tearing at the very fabric of society in unprecedented proportions. The tearing process is also a seductive one as western peoples in all classes continue to enjoy the fruits of a materialist way to life. This way of life insinuates itself into the psyches of human beings and they lose, in the process, any name of action, as Shakespeare put it in that famous soliloquy from Hamlet. As these same human beings watch the world's horrors continue on apparently unabated night after night and day after day and ill-equipped to interpret the social commmotion at play throughout the planet, they listen to the pundits of error and sink deeper into a slough of despond. The process has always reminded me of the Greeks in the 5th century BC during that golden age as the sophists poured their advice on a hapless Athenian democracy before that experiment was snuffed out as fast as it had arisen.

As the Guardian wrote so eloquently back in the midst of WW2 as the German war-machine was still gaining in strength and inflicting its terror on the European continent: humankind can neither perceive the origins nor discern the outcomes of this tempest, a tempest that is deranging the equilibrium of the world's inhabitants. Bewildered, agonized and helpless these inhabitants watch and wait. And so, in many ways, do we all whether we are active participants in this new culture of learning, this new paradigm, or whether we chose to be bystanders and observe it all from a distance, from the comfort of our homes as it is often said.

Of course, the growing size and influence of the worldwide Bahai community will spark and is already sparking a much more thorough investigation by outsiders of what this community is all about. One result of such an investigation has been the asking of tough questions about the many ways the Bahai religion's teachings deviate from cultural norms. This investigative process, as I say, has already begun to happen in these first years of this new paradigm. Some of the questions have been tough; some of the answers have been tough and differing opinions have resulted not only in the generation of sparks of truth but in the generation of ranglings and resentments, resignations and recriminations. The Bahai rules of discourse and their emphasis on an etiquette of expression, on solid thinking, on the attainment of correct perspectives, on the adoption of proper attitudes, on moderation in all things as part of the critical base of true liberty, on the ramifications in speech of the many dynamics of the term 'freedom of expression'--these are discussed in only a cursory fashion in this book. They are only one example of an aspect of the Bahai Faith that differs markedly from accepted practice in the United States in particular and in western countries generally.

RESTRICTIONS ON DISCOURSE?

If the Bahai religion is ever to have substantial influence in these western countries, the Bahai distinctives--both positive ones from a cultural point of view, such as racial integration--and negative ones, such as restrictions on discourse--will also have to be explored and sharply debated more than they already have. Already in the first 15 years of this new paradigm the debate has gone on certainly just about ad nauseam--at least for those with internet access, those with literary tastes and proclivities and those who like to ask provocative questions about the religion they have joined. I trust this book will contribute in its own way to this ongoing inevitable and necessary dialogue. As I say the interchange has already begun in earnest in the first two decades of the operation of this paradigm. Friederich Hayek(1899-1992), the Austrian-born economist and philosopher known for his defense of classical liberalism, wrote in his The Constitution of Liberty that: "Liberty not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and the burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions...Liberty and responsibility are inseparable." The members of the Bahai community are also faced with this dichotomy of the opportunity and the burden of the freedom of choice on the one hand and the responsibilities on the other.

FINALLY: PARADIGM ANALYSIS AND INTELLECTUAL UNDERPINNINGS OF THE PARADIGM

Paradigm analysis, as Christopher Buck put it in his review of Udo Schaefer's book Beyond the Clash of Religions: The Emergence of a New Paradigm(Zero Palm Press, Prague, 1995)is an integrative approach to the study of a religion as a system. It has heuristic or explanatory power in disclosing the concatenating or the interconnected logics of belief: faith, doctrine, ethos; and of praxis: ritual, piety, and ethics. Precisely because it takes this approach, Udo Schaefer's Beyond the Clash of Religions: The Emergence of a New Paradigm is an important contribution to Bahá'í studies. It is more than coincidental, it seems to me, that this book appeared the year before the emergence of this new paradigm and Buck's review appeared in the same year that this paradigm was launched.

The consequence of the modern world's subjectivisation of truth, Schaefer argues, is that social standards are no longer viable or possible. Indeed, while Schaefer asserts that the stability of society is bound up with a generally accepted value system, he is quick to point out that universal standards of morals and human values are largely lacking in modern and postmodern society. In this spiritual vacuum, New Age movements fail to provide any consensus on whatever direction society ought to take. New Age spirituality is so polymoral that it is functionally amoral. In the final pages of this essay, Schaefer introduces the Bahá'í Faith as offering a new paradigm anchored in revelation, in which the will of God for the world today is apprehended and affirmed by faith, and a universal value system is offered.

In contrast to "the old ecclesiastical paradigm" of Christian salvation, "the new paradigm depicts a divine economy of salvation, according to Schaefer. The nature of this "economy" is paradigmatically different from traditional Christianity. The nature of this new paradigm is developed in the second essay, "On the Diversity and Unity of Religions." This essay begins with a "Prefatory Note on the Concept of Paradigm," in which the author assimilates Thomas Kuhn's definition of "paradigm" as "the entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by a member [sic; read "the members"] of a given community." Schaefer then speaks of the "unity paradigm" central to Bahá'í belief and praxis. The rest of the essay unpacks this core concept. Udo Schaefer has effectively adapted Kuhn's concept of "paradigm" and "paradigm-shift" from the history of science to the history of religion. Udo Schaefer's work could be said to be one of the several intellectual underpinnings for this new paradigm in the Bahai community, a paradigm that began to form in Bahai groups all around the world in the decade after Schaefer's book was published. The new paradigm of culture and learning in the last two decades, it seems to me, could be said to find one of its broad, sociological, psychological and historical frameworks for action, an intellectual and analytical overview in Schaefer's timely book.

The writings of Bahais like Lample, Arbab and Martin, among others, have been useful in providing initial sketches of this new paradigm. The work of The International Teaching Centre, that institution which has been specifically invested with the twin functions of the protection and propagation of the Cause of God(sometimes I use the acronym ITC), cannot be ignored in providing preliminary and early consultation in relation to the paradigm that was put in place by the House of Justice in 1996. The International Teaching Centre has had a pivotal and primary role in this entire shift in the Bahai community. It is an institution established as far back as June 1973 and it brought to fruition the work of the Hands of the Cause of God residing in the Holy Land and provided for the extension into the future of functions with which that body had been endowed as far back as the late 19th century by Bahaullah Himself. It has brought a "degree of energy," as the House pointed out in its Ridvan 2010 message, "to this worldwide enterprize," to this new paradigm. The ITC is now turning its attention, the House wrote in that same message, to questions related to the efficacy of activities at the cluster level and to childrens classes among other foci of concern.

MY OWN CONTRIBUTION: A RETROSPECTIVE

As much as I would like to see the words of my own book here, this very long essay, contributing to the correction of some of the inappropriate attitudes, at least inappropriate as I see them, and as much as I would like to see a resulting enlargement of the perspectives of readers, what some might see as a somewhat pretentious goal, my aim rather and simply is to have this somewhat lengthy piece of writing contribute to that inevitable and necessary ongoing dialogue, as I have called it above, on any and perhaps many of the questions regarding this complex and ongoing process of paradigm change. If this book can assist in opening up, in helping readers pose questions rather than providing some set of answers; if this book can help lead to an openness of mind, a humility of response and readiness of apprehension; if it can help readers find resolutions rather than solutions; and if it can help them be comfortable with the many paradoxes not only within this Faith but within life itself, I will have achieved much pleasure as a member of this mysterious Cause.

Such, then, are some of my simple and not-so-simple goals in posting this essay, this article, this book, within this immense archival collection of print resources at Baha’i Library Online. As I go about this mediation and meditation on several themes, a process that involves differentiating my incoming sensory information, my intuitions, my reasonings and the long tradition of thought on the subjects in the Bahai community--I aim to integrate all of this into generalizable patterns of interpretation. This is no easy task and I'm sure I only achieve it in part. I am enabled, though, to some extent at least, to make more meaningful decisions myself and to act within the context of this new paradigm as I decide just what it means for me and my participation.

What action each of us takes and makes is, in the end, what is crucial and understanding lays the foundation for this action. As I write this book I am extending the foundation and defining that part of the foundation I have already laid for future activity in this Cause. Participation in this new paradigm is never finished; one's work may be relaxed and occasionally abandoned to give the spirit a rest. Michelangelo put this concept of one's work the same way in relation to his creative activity, his art. As much as this paradigm shift contains many changes in the ways I and my fellow Bahais go about things, it is not the basis of a revolution and, for those who see it as a revolutionary change, it is in the character of Bahai revolutions-a quiet one, at least in most places. Much of Bahai life will go on as it has done in its two century-long history for at its core the revolution we are all involved in is: spiritual, universal and entirely outside of man's control.

THE NATURE OF BAHAI COMMUNITY LIFE

The House pointed out back in 2002(22/8)in describing the nature of Bahai community life: "To mistakenly identify Bahai community life with the mode of religious activity that characterizes the general society--in which the believer is a member of a congregation, leadership comes from an individual or individuals presumed to be qualified for the purpose, and personal participation is fitted into a schedule dominated by concerns of a very different nature--can only have the effect of marginalizing the Faith and robbing the community of the spiritual vitality available to it." It should also be emphasized that we should not mistakenly identify Bahai community life with what we see at the local level in our own communities. These are still early days. Such local examples are only the here and now in a very specific location and there are a myriad locations on the planet where this community life exists. Maintaining and deepening Bahai culture, one of the functions of this new paradigm, is dependent on how the Bahais live their daily lives, on the strength of their beliefs and on the nature of their values as well as on possessing the appropriate attitudes. The post-modern citizen in the West is trapped in a culture which in many ways is a setting for a 24 hour frenzy of competing messages, instincts and desires, all playing with their self-esteem.

Living in a culture where even private space is invaded by the unforgiving demands of the public sphere and even the natural effects of ageing are seen as a sign of moral laxitude inevitably has an immense impact and often an unhealthy effect on perceptions of the self and the whole issue of health. The Bahai culture of learning and growth has to deal with this dominant culture and its frenzy which, as that emmminent professor emeritus of history at Harvard University, Dr. Firuz Kazemzadeh, said as far back as the 1960s, this dominant culture makes the Bahai 99% dominant culture in the expression of his daily life and 1% the new age Bahai. Even if that erudite professor of history is only partly right, his point is clear and especially relevant to this new paradigm and its goals and acheivements.

The Canadian sociologist, Will van den Hoonaard, in the very last paragraph of his study of the first fifty years of Bahai history in Canada(1898-1948) emphasizes that the Bahai community is quintessentially a global one and Bahais and others need to "delocalize" their understanding of new religious movements like the Bahai Faith. The bona fide context, the viability, the measuring tools for the study of this new Faith, is an international one and not what happens in one particular bailiwick, one cluster, one locality, down the road in woop-woop, where often there is no overt-evidence of this new Cause at all. The spread of this Cause is universal, gradual and, like Christianity over several centuries of its expansion in the first millennium, a spiritual revolution in the Hands of God with some help from the followers of His latest manifestation.

GIVING SHAPE MEANING AND INTEGRATION TO OUR TIME

The Bahai cosmology and its metaphorical-mythological base does what any myth and cosmology must do in our time, in the words of T.S. Eliot, "give shape and significance to the immense panorama of anarchy and futility which is contemporary history." Generally speaking, the shifting confusions and complexities of today's postmodern moment require historical, sociological and psychological contexts, explanatory frameworks to help people make sense of their society and their lives. William S. Hatcher, in his Essays on Science, Religion and Philosophy, entitled ‘Logic & Logos’, provides a concise description of the organismic theory of history where he associates childhood, adolescence, and adulthood in the life of an individual to primary integration, differentiation, and secondary integration, respectively, in humanity’s social life. He writes: "Primary integration...is characterized by a relative lack of a sharply differentiated human awareness. In this stage, people tended to perceive themselves as part of a whole, as one with nature and a preestablished natural order into which they fit. This is strongly analogous to the child’s perception of himself as undifferentiated from his family and immediate environment."

The second basic stage in the process of social evolution, that of differentiation, is analogous to adolescence in the life of the individual. For the individual, adolescence is characterized by mature physical development coupled with relatively immature emotional and spiritual development. Through competition and conflict, analysis and criticism, the adolescent forges self-awareness. The adolescent stage in the collective life of humanity is characterized by a relatively high degree of scientific and technological achievement, coupled with relatively immature forms of social organization and human interaction.

The third basic stage in collective human growth, that of secondary integration, corresponds to maturity or adulthood in the life of the individual. The individual seeks self-integration through a new synthesis, a synthesis based on the analytical and critical distinctions he has made and the differentiated capacities he has developed. Thus, to achieve its collective maturity, humankind must move forward towards an entirely new synthesis. This synthesis, this new culture of learning, this new paradigm is at the service of all of humankind. All the qualities of each Bahai acquire dignity if that Bahai knows that the collectivity he or she serves and in which they participate needs them. If proud of that collectivity, that new Order, his or her own pride rises in proportion. The Bahai collectivity or community has aspects that are like a spiritual army and the individual is nourished to the extent that they feel genuine pride in the new Order that Bahaullah has brought. This aspect of the new culture, though, is complex for the army of Bahais is not like your regular army with its guns and swords and uniforms. This army requires wisdom and understanding on the part of its members; indeed, it has some interesting parallels to the army envisaged by Carl von Clausewitz's in his study "On War" which he wrote in the early decades of the 19th century.

I'll place three prose-poems into this book at this point. They are somewhat tangential to the main theme but they reflect my experience both before and after the beginning of this paradigm and they place the orientation of my work, my participation, in this new paradigm into a helpful perspective. I hope the following three prose-poems are, indeed, helpful to readers.

THE KIND OF WAR

Carl von Clausewitz’s book or series of essays which became the book "On War" was written in the years 1817 to 1829. Clausewitz was trying to gain an understanding and clarification of the principles of conflict, of war. The nature of war has changed in ways Clausewitz did not anticipate, and they will continue to do so in the centuries ahead I have little doubt. Certainly for me and my daily life and my contemporaries in the half century, 1960-2010, warfare has a new mise en scene. All the wars I fought were in my personal life, in my private domain. Even here, though, inspite of all the changes, the principles of warfare outlined by Clausewitz are relevant. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs,9 February 2003.

It’s a different war these days
than the ones my father
and his father and fathers before
went to with guns and uniforms
and marching, marching. Marching.

A tightening in the gut, real fear,
morning after morning,
wanting to run away
from this stoney, narrow and tortuous path,
learning to love it, slowly, slowly, slowly--
well, most of it.

It’s the kind of war that wears you
down, year after year as you learn
to keep your forces concentrated-
that simple law of strategy-
and keep faithful to the principles
you--and he--have laid down.(1)

(1) These were the first two principles laid down by Clausewitz in his book.

SUBTLE ELUSIVE AND COMPLEX

Often men go to war and are there for several months, a year, several years. The souls who make up “the armies of God”, who “attack the armies of the world” and “the right and left wings of the hosts”1 often must fight in this spiritual contest for most of their lives. Having been in the field now as a pioneer for more than fifty years and been a student of my own life, taking account each day, I can see some of the reasons for my failure or, to put it more gently, some of the reasons why I have not been more successful. One: I lack the purity on which so much depends. ‘Abdu’l-Baha says “sanctified breath will even affect the rock; otherwise there will be no result whatsoever.”2 I am only too aware of the quantity and quality of my sins of omission and commission. My secret thoughts are far from pure. May future soldiers in the army take note and learn from the mistakes of soldiers of the first two generations(1963-1986) and (1986-2010) of this tenth and last stage of history. Two: I have failed to eliminate contention, disputation and traces of controversy from my life. ‘Abdu’l-Baha commands that I do this.3 -Ron Price with appreciation to ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, USA, 1977, 1 p. 48, 2 p.51 and 3 p.53.

These are but two reasons why
my success has been less than
the best. For when you are
talking a lifetime you must be
faithful to the principles of war(1)
even more than in those limited
contests of short duration, for the
affair is subtle, elusive and complex;
but we are still talking war, inspite
of all appearances to the contrary.

I seem to be fighting, now, on
last legs, confining my skirmishes
only to battles that I can clearly
contribute some results and see
ideal forces and lordly confirmations...
rush to my support and reinforcement.(2)
These fifty years have worn me down
and, like Zaynu’l-Muqarribin, I long
to rise out of this life, awaiting departure
from day to day.(3)....I pushed too long and
hard and intense, not being a man of much
moderation; I was also more than a little
aware that my weaknesses might sweep me
into that fathomless gulf so sadly!!(4)

1 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, 1817-1829. The first systematic study of war and its principles.
2 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Tablets of the Divine Plan, p.47.
3 ‘Abdu’l-Baha, Memorials of the Faithful, p.153.
4 ibid., p.119.

ON WAR

"The idea of modern total war," writes sociologist Robert Nisbet, "was born in the famous decree of the National Convention, August 23, 1793." This decree resulted in the creation of a mass army, a citizen army, the first in human history in France. Carl von Clausewitz's book On War followed forty years after. Clausewitz wrote, according to Nisbet, "the single most influential book written in modern times on war" in the years 1817 to 1827. On War, a book on strategy and tactics, on the philosophy of war and the relation between society and the individual, was begun one hundred years before another book on war, a spiritual war, The Tablets of the Divine Plan. In 1793, too, Shaykh Ahmad left his home in Bahrain to begin the process of that spiritual, that total war, a war of quite a different character, characterized in those Tablets by what you might call 'a military metaphor.' -Ron Price with thanks to Robert Nisbet, The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought, Heinemann, London, 1973, p.70.

Sharper than blades of steel
and hotter than summer heat,
placed somewhere inside,
pervasive,but as natural as
the weather, unassuming,
unobtrusive, you'd never
know or guess that it was
war. 'Twas more like a fun
park with distractions and
pleasures enough to keep us
all laughing to the grave and
all this amidst a tempest that
threatened to tear us apart in
a third world war that does
its insinuations while we go
shopping, watch movies and
get entertained more than any
generation the world has seen.

Bahais are dealing now, as they have been for over one hundred years, with the nucleus and pattern of the new global community the world will one day adopt in its entirety in a process that can hardly be envisaged at this very early stage of its embryogenesis, its first stages of institutional evolution. Some writers try to grasp this complex process but, as the Guardian emphasized, we stand too close to it and these are too early days to even sketch the process of that evolution in even the briefest of contexts. We have other things on our agenda and they can be found in this new paradigm. This new paradigm is just another stage, another step in the long road toward the establishment of a unified society with justice and peace. The dominant principle of this cycle is the political and religious unification of the planet and the process has been underway for at least six millennia: during three periods in one great cycle beginning metaphorically, symbolically, mythologically, with Adam in 4000 BC(circa) and ending some 500,000 years hence(Bahai Studies,V.9, p.37). The process is majestic, extremely complex, anarchistic in some of its essential aspects but one which will gradually unfold to the eyes of the generations in the decades ahead in this and future paradigms in the evolving World Order of Bahaullah.

To the mass of the Bahais is given many functions. The "power to accomplish the tasks of the community resides primarily in the entire body of the believers" and this is true more than ever before in this new paradigm. Without muscle,effort, energy and action in a myriad forms the organism that is the Bahai community is doomed to inaction and inactivity. To quote one reference which places this growth process in perspective: "The World Centre of the Faith itself is paralyzed if such a support on the part of the rank and file of the community is denied it"(Shoghi Effendi, Citadel of Faith 130-131). The organism that is this new world Faith can be likened to a tree with a massive root system, an immense trunk, branches, buds, stems, off-shoots, twigs and folliage. It is now spread over the surface of the Earth. It is growing larger and larger and, one day, will be found in every locality where human beings are gathered.

This culture of learning and growth, this new paradigm, has a theoretical base. Theory comes first in any analysis of the practice. I don’t assume that some natural instinct or some simplistic description is all that is required in responding to this paradigm. If you say you don’t have a theory, what you’re telling me is that you’re a natural or you’re “open minded” and that you just read or hear or see “what’s there.” You don’t have a filter of understanding; you don’t mediate what's there, you don't mediate the process and the content of the paradigm. I don’t think that is good enough. We are all wearing prescriptive lenses as we go through our lives. I have a theory that asks what’s my prescription? What is my prescription right now in my life? The isolated self in this new culture of learning and growth pays attention to the cultural surroundings, to as much of this new paradigm as possible, including all the variant stories that Bahai history and the history of our wider society reveals. If this does not take place, then this self-designed life is no more than a self-enclosed and oxygen-deprived entity. He or she is rather like a plant whose roots turn inward, toward eventual death, although it is surrounded by what would invigorate it if it would only act and do, think and be in a wider, a social, context. And for each of us their experience of their cultural surroundings is different as is their response and their activity within this new paradigm.

TRANSFORMATION

Central to this theme of spiritual development lies the process of transformation which results from, and is part of, the function of nourishment. Transformation constitutes undeniably the life force in all living organisms releasing new powers and revitalizing the old. By transforming food substances into minerals, vitamins, and proteins cells are able to multiply and able to sustain the organism’s growth. The body of believers similarly is bound by this vital law. In its 1989 Ridván Message, the Universal House of Justice affirms: "It is not enough to proclaim the Bahá’í message, essential as that is. It is not enough to expand the rolls of Bahá’í membership, vital as that is. Souls must be transformed, communities thereby consolidated, new models of life thus attained. Transformation is the essential purpose of the Cause of Bahá’u’lláh." The transforming, nourishing, agent in Bahá’í community is the Divine Word and the act in the play is the ongoing spiritual intercourse between the soul and its Creator, just as nature derives its sustenance and energy from the omnipresent rays of the sun.

Some people, of course, see this as purely utopian fantasy. But, to quote old Oscar Wilde: those who would build a new world, those who would work at social improvement, an improvement that is not ultimately utopian in its form and spirit, should work at some other task. Some writers might see the Bahai paradigm as one of utopian realism. This could be defined as a vision of alternative futures whose very propagation might help them be realised. “A community is.....a comprehensive unit of civilization," so wrote the House of Justice back in 1996 at the outset of this new paradigm, "composed of individuals, families and institutions that are originators and encouragers of systems, agencies and organizations working together with a common purpose for the welfare of people both within and beyond its own borders; it is a composition of diverse, interacting participants that are achieving unity in an unremitting quest for spiritual and social progress.” To this common purpose there is added in this new paradigm a shared vocabulary about growth and an extension of various disciplined foci in several indicators of Bahai community life and its vitality and strength. But the acquisition of spiritual qualities, motivations to "conform ourselves to that meekness which no provocation can ruffle, to that patience which no affliction can overwhelm, to that integirty which no self-interest can shake" is not done overnight and, even after a lifetime, the individual often falls lamentably short in this and in any of the Bahai paradigms past, present orfuture. This reality must be faced squarely, admitted and accepted. We can't be too hard on ourselves or on others if they or we do not reach the heights. Still we each must arise and struggle within the context of our own limitations and abilities. Transformation is not an overnight event from copper to gold. With fire We test the gold and with gold We test Our servants. I leave you, dear reader, with the copper, the gold and the fire--and the complexity of the concept of tranformation.

BAHAI ADMINISTRATION:ELASTICITY AND FIXITY

The elasticity and specificity which characterizes Bahá’í administration ensures that Bahá’í communities are able to ‘reproduce’ themselves in different localities without losing essential features of their identity. This elasticity and this specificity is at the core of this new paradigm. While such elasticity and specificity are necessary they are not sufficient to keep the body of this Cause intact. It is here that the laws of the Covenant come into play wherever and whenever the Cause expands as it is, as it will and as it inevitably must in the decades ahead. The adherence of Bahá’ís to a legal structure guaranteed by the authenticity of its constitution protecting the body of the Cause from internal divisions secures a process whereby Bahá’í communities are able to reproduce themselves in dramatically different cultural settings without destroying the power of unity. I have watched this process now since the 1950s and it is a deceptively simple concept with transformative implications. There is a strong collective Bahai identity at local, national and international levels. It is not a fiction and this identity does not suture over the individual identities in the community.

TRANSFORMATION, CHRISTIANITY AND THE BAHAI FAITH

This transformation, however fast it proceeds in some ways, it also proceeds in ways that are slow and often unobservable to the casual observer. I have often thought that the Bahai Faith is insinuating itself into modern society in ways not dissimilar to Christianity in its first centuries as it grew along the edges of Roman society and its mature, well-organized, rich and intellectually sophisticated empire. Christ's message prevailed because it won its way into the hearts of living men and women. It triumphed because its spiritual force could no longer be denied. Acting upon his faith, the early Christian does what the modern Bahai does; he or she goes about quietly and for the most part, obscurely, to bring about the promised day. Responding to opposition, Christianity defined itself slowly, sensibly and insensibly, as the decades and the centuries advanced. Christianity's success though, it seems to me, was due to its essential truth rather than its usefulness, although that is not a simple dichotomy and the subject is far too complex to deal with here in even a cursory manner.

After more than fifty years of observing this new world religion and being a teacher of ancient history myself, I have often been struck by the remarkable parallels between the growth of Christianity and the Bahai Faith. External opposition to and internal disagreements within the Bahai Cause have been, are and will be one of the main ways that this Cause comes to define itself over the decades and centuries. The process of dealing with opposition, with persecution, with conflict and arguments of many kinds takes place within the context of a special armory of spiritual incentives within and protracted struggles without. Over time, over the decades and centuries, the struggle changes its colouration, its intensity, its dynamics. Man suffering, striving and doing as he is and was and ever shall be is at the centre of the process and gradually the basic orientation of the Founder becomes the way of life for a whole society.

Iranian clerics see the new Force, the new Revelation, as a form of heresy to be eradicated. Critics within the Cause, often with some axe-to-grind such as the view that impositions of orthodoxy or of dogma are being foisted on the community; such as the view that conservative institutions with authoritarian methods, dictatorial decision-making and ecclesiastical prerogatives---these critics are on the scene from decade to decade with their particular agenda which they bring before the wider community of believers. Their polarized, their divisive, often hair-splitting, often legitimate concerns occupy the places of dialogue for a time before the topics and themes change with the epochs, the stages, the phrases and the ages of the new Faith. For the most part, though, this paradigm is developing a culture in which the Bahais support one another and advance together in a movement which, over time, will be irrepressible. In saying this, though, the process and the game, so to speak, is not easy and tests and difficulties are built into every movement forward.

OPEN AND FIXED BOUNDARIES: EXCLUSIVITY AND INCLUSIVITY

The Bahai community has been moving toward a more open and inclusive community in the first two decades of the implementation of this paradigm. The history of the Cause over 17 decades has seen a range of policies and attitudes to exclusivity and inclusivity. There has been a history of alternating positions from fixed and definite boundaries on the one hand to loose and amorphous edges of belief, membership qualifications and definitions on the other. It is a story unto itself and I do not deal with this story here. But, however inclusive and flexible membership policies are and attitudes to those in other interest groups as well as the various categories of the alienated and marginal Bahais within this new paradigm, the spread of the internet during the first two decades of its existence led to unprecedented situations for the institutions of the Cause and some of the Bahais on the internet.

Almost overnight at the start of this new paradigm the institutions and individuals on the internet had to deal with a wide-range of dissidents, people whose exit-narratives were available for all to read, the stories of unenrolled Bahais and covenant-breakers. All they had to do was exercise their wrists with a few clicks on their mouse and be curious enough to want to read these stories and investigate these sites. Some believers, well-versed in the teachings, also arose in cyberpsace. They responded to the arguments of these covenant-breakers and various souls with axes to grind as they exited from the Cause or hung on its periphery complaining of this or that. One such believer was a Brent Poirier who directly took on the specious arguments of the covenant-breakers. It was a good thing there were the Brent Poiriers on the net. New believers or even old one who had never really got their study of the Covenant up to scratch, who came across covenant-breakers' sites and threads--knowingly or unknowingly, they would usually not have the intellectual weaponry to deal with the often clever turns of phrase and old arguments in new dress.

COVENANT-BREAKING: OLD AND NEW

As the fifteenth year of this new paradigm was about to open in April 2011 Bahais on the internet were able to read the curious phenomenon of an attempt to revive the claims of Mirza Muhammad Ali, the archbreaker of the Covenant after the passing of Bahaullah. These claims have been revived by a group known as the ‘Unitarian Bahai Association’ in order to lend legitimacy to their existence, as what they saw as a newly-established sect. This ‘Unitarian Bahai Association’ avowed loyalty to Baha’u’llah but rejected the authority that Baha’u’llah gave to Abdu’l-Baha and the Universal House of Justice. These claims were made on a web site and in postings to discussion groups. These people’s own public statements have already told the part of the world that engages in internet discussions at several sites what they are about. One of those who have been publicising this attempt on facebook was an Eric Stetson. Stetson gave Bahais, so he wrote on his site, an opportunity to demonstrate why the rehabilitation of Muhammad Ali was not a realistic alternative to accepting the authority that Baha’u’llah gave to Abdu’l-Baha to lead the Bahai community. This is a sample of some of the developments in the narrow-world of covenant breaking within this new paradigm.

The reason for the Bahá'í policy of shunning the violators of the Covenant was not that they had a different religion; it was because there is such a thing as a Covenant, and it is no trifle to be played with. The Covenant, combined with the policy that the Bahai community does not use violence nor in any way discriminates against the legitimate rights of the covenant-breakers, but simply leaves them to God, is the greatest protection for our children and great-great-grandchildren from the curse of sectarian strife that has clouded the undoubted light of both Christianity and Islam. The blood on the robes of past religions comes not just from their lack of an explicit written covenant identifying the successor to the Founder and his authorities, but also from the lack of a clear principle that sectarian tendencies must be combatted only by shunning those who form sects. Still, shunning is a difficult concept for western and liberally-minded people of secular humanistic proclivities to get a handle on. One often reads of criticisms of the shunning policy and the Bahai community will have to deal with arguments, with the lance-and-parry of words, dealing with its issues for some time to come in this new paradigm.

THE DISGRUNTLED, THE ALIENTATED AND THOSE WITH SAD STORIES TO TELL

As that fine essayist in Canada whom I used to know in my youth, Jack McLean, has observed, the Bahá’í community has not seen the end of the complaints of the constantly disgruntled, the doctrinally innovative and the permanently embittered. McLean goes on to say that he does not doubt for a moment that Bahá'ís get hurt and continue to feel hurt, that some have been betrayed by a fellow believer or that some decision by an administrative body has not gone their way. Most Bahá’ís, if they live long enough, will find some ax-to-grind or be the subject of an administrative decision that has not gone their way. This applies to those who are now or have been members of LSAs and many other branches of the quite complex organization, some might say labyrinth, that is now Bahai administration. These experiences contribute to the awakening of all of us to the stark realities of the human condition.

One of the keys to the sympathetic ear temporarily lent to the many disgruntled souls one comes across in the Bahá'í world of several millions has to do with the way that organized religion is generally perceived in contemporary society. In modernity, religion and spirituality have gone their separate ways. Individuals may willingly affirm their theism or spirituality, but many disavow being official members of an “organized religion.” The Bahai Faith is a religion whose organizational structure is part of the spiritual base; indeed, as Shoghi Effendi often emphasized, the organizational form is the crucial factor in what distinguishes this new Faith from all others.

The whole notion of being against organized religion per se is a strange one, when one thinks about it. People, generally, do not object to organized government, to an organized judiciary, to organized political parties, to organized education, to organized medicine, clubs, associations and societies. But except for official members, the religious “organization” in a secular age has become definitely suspect. Of course, even these other organized bodies and especially their authority structures, are the object of criticism. Our age is, as one priminent sociology put it, characterized by the twilight of authority. In Australia where I have lived for nearly forty years, any organized body, any authority figure sets themselves up for receiving criticism. It's part and parcel, the given, in the life of authority figures and organizations. If they don't earn respect, they don't get it and not everyone is good at getting everyone's respect all the time. There is probably no one who has ever lived who has received the respect of everyone in their community, except back in the band and chieftom societies, the first units of social organization on the planet whose groups were very small, usually less than one hundred as anthropologists inform us, and a sense of crisis was always present.

Uninformed observers, consequently, and there are plenty of these people around in community life since there is so much to be informed about these days, tend to be predisposed to accept the viewpoint of the critic or dissident without further reflection or investigation. If the person has dissented from a religious institution, ergo, the charges must be true and they must be a victim: at least, that is often the hasty conclusion of some doco on TV, some newspaper article or some internet post. This predisposition has clearly been at work in the last 15 years on the internet in a number of cases, some noteworthy and most insignificant. What these critics and dissidents fail to realize, and often do not accept, is that the Bahá’í Faith, while it allows for a fair and reasonable largesse of individual interpretation, has nonetheless its own doctrinal boundaries and ethical norms.

In the final analysis these doctrinal boundaries and ethical norms are simply not accepted by some individuals who, driven by frustration at the non-acceptance of the perceived moral rightness of their cause or by their ego-mania, by what you might call a hyper-individualism or by the insinuating principles of 2500 years of democracy's threads and five hundred years of Protestantism which often elavates individual conscience to an ultimate position of authority--engage in corrosive attacks which by definition are beyond the ethical norms and the principles of consultation which Bahá’u’lláh has mandated to replace acrimonious and divisive debate.

PLAUSIBILITY STRUCTURES OF ALIENATION

The activity of many of those who become in various ways alienated from the Bahai community build up what one writer has called "plausibility structures." Many of those who were anxious and frustrated in the Bahai community worked and reworked their experience in detailed and graphic accounts to tell people about their disappointments, the axes they wound-up grinding in often graphic detail and what became over time their many criticisms of the Cause. As I say, the major platforms for these exercises in the last 15 years during this new paradigm have been the internet and its plethora of sites. The Bahai Faith has a massive internet presence for those who want to investigate what it is all about. The world wide web is a place where anyone who wants to tell their story can do so and we all have stories to tell. Telling stories of ones life, writing engaging narratives, watching them on TV and listening to them on the radio in the print and electronic media is all the rage these days. If we dont watch out we will literally drown in stories. I do alot of telling stories in this book. I, too, have had deep anxieties and concerns, but my writing does not place me into the many negative categories that are popular in some internet circles and that are ennumerated above.

The history of the Faith over more than a century and a half is filled with people who have had axes to grind and who have had sad stories to tell. Covenants have often been broken, an inevitability in more than a century and a half of historical and community experience involving millions of souls. Not all of life, inside and outside this Cause, consists of joys and deep and meaningful experience. Bahai history has its tragic side, its hatreds, its jealousies, its story of sins of omission and commission. One can no more judge this Cause by the behaviour of its members, its narratives of encomium and opprobrium, than one can judge this Faith by the ineptitude of its embryonic institutions, the weakest links among its millions of adherents or some of the horror stories that have begun to emerge in the narratives told by those who want to expose the downside of this Faith's two century-old history. There are now many more sad tales available for all to read. The impression has often been created among those who were curious enough to read the many stories of bitter experiences spread across cyberspace, stories of various forms of disaffection, of a whole new generation of divisive forces within the Cause of a house divided, indeed, of a very unattrative religion. Perhaps the greatest achievement in the fifteen long decades of the history of the Bahai Faith is that its unity is still firmly intact. All of this internet casuistry and complaining, this criticism and contention is but the expression of yet another generation of forces which have not had the least affect in dividing a religion which in the centuries ahead will play a critical and mysterious role in the unification of our planet.

Often these narratives of division, though, are more than impressions. This Cause has always had to deal with divisive forces right from May of 1844 when there were many Shaykhis who did not follow the Bab but remained outside the new fold which emerged from within that Shaykhi school of the Ithna-Ashariyyih sect of Shi'ah Islam. In the 1850s and 1860s these divisive tendencies continued. This book is not intended as a history which provides an outline of these tendencies. The history, the narrative in relation to divisive forces has been no tea-party. The story is long and complex and, for a student of history like myself, it is a fascinating account. The student of this Cause should not expect this paradigm to be any different. In some ways the Cause itself comes to define itself by dealing with the differences that arise in each generation.

A recently published memoir by Dr. Youness Afroukhteh(George Ronald, 2003)of his nine years in Akka from 1900 to 1909 is one good example of what I am writing about here. This Bahai historian-memoirist outlined three types of covenant-breakers: (i) openly offensive people, (ii) those who were entirely severed from the Cause and played no part in its activities and (iii) trouble-makers, evil-doers, spies and informers. Each of the Central Figures of this Cause, Shoghi Effendi and the House of Justice have all had to deal with divisive forces and people in these categories. The remarkable thing is that this Faith has remained a religion that is still unified after nearly two centuries of its history. Those who have broken the Covenant and, in various ways, been harbingers of conflict and contention, or bred opposition and its dreadful schizmatic consequences have no place in this Cause. As I mention elsewhere in this book, the internet gives the impression of schism, but the impression is utterly unreal. As Toynbee points out in volume 1 of his A Study of History it took Western Christianity "more than three centuries to final achieve a schism.(p.66) And Christianity had none of the protections that this new Faith possesses. What exists now is simply a handful of disgruntled and disaffected people.

Bahaullah has protected this Faith against the baneful effects of the misuse of criticism; indeed, "dissidence is a moral and intellectual contradiction of the main objective animating the Bahai community."(UHJ, Letter to Bahais of USA, 29/12/88) We must be constantly on our guard, therefore, lest destructive and divisive forces enter our midst. The building of community, playing the role of custodians of unific forces will keep us all busy in the years ahead within this new paradigm as the Faith goes from strength to strength. After fifty years of participation in Bahai community life, I have found that the fine details of the story are only of interest to a relatively small circle of the Bahais and only a small handful of those outside this new Faith, those with some ax-to-grind. This reaction to a very complex history, of course, will change as this Cause comes under attack in the decades ahead within this new paradigm. Indeed, in the last 15 years there has begun to emerge a significant increase in the numbers of new recruits in several countries in the world and this story of an increase in numbers will be part and parcel of this new paradigm in the years, the decades, ahead in its implementation. The Bahai world waits with wonder as it has always waited with wonder at the increase in numbers, an increase which has made it the second most widespread religion on the planet with its second century far, far, from over.

The impression of divisiveness and critical opposition, as I say, has been correct, but it has only been part of a new generation, a vocal part, a literary part. Their opposition is, in the main, to this Faith's administration, and to individuals within the institutions of the learned or the rulers. Often the opposition is just a simple disobedience to direct instructions from the House of Justice. With increasing numbers of people entering the Cause in the years ahead within this new paradigm, I'm sure we have not heard the end of what you might call these 'opposition-narratives.' With millions of members and millions more to come there are and will be many a dead branch that will be cut off from the tree as there are many who will be on the tree but who derive little sustenance from it. And this has always been the case back to the 1860s and in the two decades of Babism before the clear emergence of the Bahai Faith from Babism by the late 1860s.

This has been the story, this tendency to diviseness, as I say, since 1844 as well as in the history of this Faith's precursors in the decades before 1844. But it has only been a tendency; it has not had the effect of cutting the tree, of dividing the boughs and branches, the stems and the offshoots. This Faith has remained united for well-nigh two centuries and this, it could be argued, has been its greatest achievement in spite of immense efforts to divide---and the story is far from over!

The basic problem of what you might call the negative side of behaviour is not the essential effect they have,although that is destructive, but fundamentally the fact that we repel from ourselves spiritual powers. Positive obedience and following divine law attract to us spiritual powers. The existence of spiritual powers is vital to the activities of our daily lives. But we are vulnerable to being influenced by the lack of belief unconsciously and to behave in ways in which the rest of the society is behaving. This is only to be expected. Everyone around us is going in that direction. We’re like the salmon seeking to swim upstream but we end up going downstream with everyone else because that’s what the society around is doing. This happens from time to time; it happens to us as individuals as we struggle to retain our vision of the teachings while surrounded by people whose values are of a different kind. It even happens to our Bahá’í institutions from time to time.

Often the capabilities of our community or of our own dear selves need to be re-evaluated. We need to possess a greater realization of the power of Bahá’u’lláh to reinforce our individual and community efforts. Our deeds are indeed impotent without divine assistance. Any evaluation of a situation is entirely misleading if it does not take this supreme power into consideration. Any evaluation is wrong if we don’t take into account the power of Bahá’u’lláh to reinforce our efforts. We are all capable of falling into the trap of going the way the world is going rather than the way the teachings tell us to go. What this means is that we are called upon to continually refresh and renew our understanding of this vital abstract concept. It’s difficult because of its abstraction. We can’t answer the most basic questions about what is spirit and issues like that, but we know it’s a vital concept. We need to refresh and renew our consciousness of this concept. How do we do that? By the use of prayer which requires a formal belief statement.

We are faced with the life-long task of maintaining a vision of the Bahá’í worldview in the face of a largely unbelieving society. It requires courage; it requires great determination to persevere in views that are contrary to the prevailing views. There are a few instances where our teachings call upon us to do things which from the perspective of the world appear to be somewhat irrational.

SOME THOUGHTS ON BAHAI HISTORY ADMINISTRATION AND ADMINISTRATORS

Bahai history is not a simple, happy and innocent bedtime story. It is a fascinating one and this new culture of learning and growth grows out of this history in all its complexity. Every movement, religion, cause and person has what you might call its dirty laundry, its sins of omission and commission, its members who bring bad-advertising with them whereever they go and, if one wants, one can live and move and have ones being immersed in this downside of Bahai history. There is plenty of stuff there if one wants to read it from those who were disaffected, alienated, mischief-makers, those who have denied its truths, repudiated its teachings and rose-up against its leaders or its institutions in some way or another. The media one day I'm sure will revel in the complex and often gruesome history of the Cause with its several generations of covenant-breakers. The media is often inclined to dwell on the cracks and fissures, the weak links and those disaffected individuals in what is now a more than 200 year history going back to the first days of the ministry of Shaykh Ahmad in the 1790s. The road for both the individuals and this Cause is often narrow, stony and tortuous and the life on the tree is often a hazardous one with many storms, strong winds, cold winters and hot dry summers. We are not called upon to be so successful and so happy that we never suffer. Our willingness to suffer is part of our demonstration of love for this Faith and what we believe it can and will do for humankind. We must also develop the spiritual muscle not to dwell on our suffering but to turn to the many sources of joy in this Faith. It is the life processes which this Faith has set in motion in which we must trust knowing that things take time and the process includes many setbacks.

The attitudes we hold to the positions, the people, who hold office in Bahai administration at all its levels is an important aspect of the unfolding of this new paradigm. The Guardian refers to their "all-important though inconspicuous manifestation" of sincere and earnest devotion. Such individuals are not the "central ornaments" of this Cause. They are not intrinsically superior to others in capacity or merit. I have always found such positions very demanding, when I have held them, and I hold these servants of the Cause in "great regard."(Shoghi Effendi, Bahai Administration, pp.78-80) not because they have earned my high regard but because I have been asked to give them this regard, this respect by the architect of its present administration, Shoghi Effendi. But I have not always held such individuals in high regard in my fifty years as a Bahai. The growth of appropriate attitudes to others, whether these others are within the administration or whether they are in the broader community and have idiosyncratic personalities who present difficulties to us personally is often a slow one. Even when one feels one has acquired the right attitudes one is often still tested and one finds one's right attitudes not-so-right. It is a lifelong test and challenge.

The qualifications of those in administrative positions set out by Shoghi Effendi are not ones which, in their entirety, that many possess. It is not easy for such individuals to win over the confidence and affection of everyone whom it is their priviledge to serve. Indeed, it seems to me, this is just about an impossible task. Individuals in positions in Bahai administration can but try and we as the served can do our best to hold them in "great regard." This, too, is often an impossible task if we are practical realists. In a letter written on behalf of the Guardian just before WW2 broke out in commenting on Bahai administrators, we find the following words: "such individuals can never hope to entirely fulfil those ideal conditions set forth in the Teachings" due to "their human limitations and imperfections."

MY OWN SAD TALES

I could tell a sad tale for I have many to tell; I could 'dump' on people in this book. Dumping was a term I used as a hippy in the 1960s. I have had my rancourous divorce from my wife and periods of alienation from the Bahai community. I got into hot water with my mother and father because of my beliefs. I could go on and on with my personal psycho-pathologies and my deep distresses. I do this in my autobiography in five volumes and 2600 pages if anyone wants to have a read at a host of internet sites where I go to be to help to those with: mental health problems, interests in creative writing and other subjects. The Review Office of the NSA of the Bahais of the USA has given me permission to post my material on the internet and so readers here may come across some of my autobiographical experience and writing at many a site if they want to do some googling.

I could very well have been one of those many marginal or inactive Bahais who have made a career out of their varying degrees of separation. But: "Here I stand," as Martin Luther once said in his now famous phrase in 1523 and I do not have the vituperation toward religious authorities in this Cause, the vituperation that Luther possessed toward his religious authority, the Papacy. The lists of those whose address is unknown and who are not contactable in the Bahai community in many countries is surprisingly high and those who have been Bahais for decades and who have lived in Bahai communities of substantial size have had many a discussion about these 'inactive believers.' The reasons, of course, are many and I could expatiate on this subject for some time. I tend to the view that this is not only an old problem but a problem that will be with us well into this new paradigm. Indeed, it has been a problem right back to the 1840s. Being an active member of the Bahai community, a member on the address list and accessible in some way or another to other Bahais, is not an easy ride, so to speak. It no longer surprises me, after an association with this Faith going back to the opening of the Chicago temple in 1953, that thousands of Bahais in many national communities have an "address unknown." I am rather of the view that, when this Bahai community has many million more members in the coming decades there will be many more of these Bahais in name only. I'm sure the inactive believer is one of the many variants of the "many are called but few are chosen" theme. But it is difficult to know who these few are...perhaps some of these inactive believers!! This Cause presents to its votaries many a complexity. One of the complexities is that the individual Bahai should not attempt to divide the community into: the deepened and the shallow, the saved and the damned, the sheep and the goats, or any one of those many dichotomies that religious communities have lived with for centuries.

I dont have any trouble, any intellectual difficulties, any hassles---a term we hippies also used to use half a century ago---with the institutionalized form of the charismatic Force at the centre of the Bahai Faith, those trustees of the global undertaking initiated by Bahaullah more than a century and a half ago. Neither do I possess what might be called an adversarial relationship with the institutions of the learned and the rulers in the Cause. I am familar with the tendency of the institutions to over-administer the handful of often inexperienced souls as if they had large populations of Bahais to regulate, as the Guardian put it in a letter written on his behalf several months before he died in 1957. I am familar,too, with individuals who want to control others and tell people what they think they ought to do. And I am only too familar with my own foibles and failings. All of this, all the negative attitudes people hold, will not go away simply because we have a new paradigm of culture and learning, of growth and community organization. As the Cause expands in the decades ahead it will have to deal with many more difficulties than it has in my lifetime.

This Cause will be protected, though, from the mischief of the aggressor and the hosts of tyranny that will arise against it in a spiritual battle at the very centre of the greatest drama in the spiritual history of the planet. The many people I have listened to, though, in my lifetime who have been critical of individuals, critical of groups of Bahais at the local, regional or national levels and/or critical of the culture in which they live will all be with us for some time at this nadir in civilization. These are the darkest hours before the dawn and one should not expect anything less. The Central Figures of this Cause all had to deal with such criticism and now the burden of that criticism falls upon the shoulders of the mass of the believers who take up the task and responsibilities of Bahai life. The process of community building, now in the last years of its second decade, will take all our energies in the decades ahead. Let there be no mistake. The cherished goal of universal participation, the Supreme Body emphasized in its Ridvan 2010 message will "move by several orders of magnitude," but, I am rather of the view that there will be many orders of magnitude to be yet achieved when I pass from this Earth in the next two or three decades.

BAHAI EXCOMMUNICATION AND DISENROLMENT

The idea of Bahá'í excommunication or Bahá'í "takfir" (the Muslim declaration of unbelief) has acquired prominence in polemics directed against the Bahá'í community generally, and specifically against the Universal House of Justice, to a degree that has gained remarkable currency even in the informal discussions of individuals, members, ex-members and non-members of the Bahá'í community, critical of Bahá'í institutions, even in non-polemical contexts on the internet. It has been applied, in good faith and without polemical animus, to the loss of administrative rights and expulsion by a Local Spiritual Assembly of openly gay believers. There exists a wide range of written opinion within this Faith on virtually all the major issues in society. The sensitive critique of and comment on the Bahá'í position on homosexuality posted at the Bahai Epistolary site is a good example of some of the recent dialogue within this new paradigm and its engagement with social issues. For the most part, this book does not engage, as I have already indicated, in dialogue on these social issues.

"More elaborately, inflammatorily, or influentially," as one writer at the Bahai Epistolary site notes, "Bahai excommunication has been prominently emphasised in blogs, internet lists, and even serious academic journals by individuals with a clear and long-standing opposition to the administrative institutions of the Bahá'í community. Concretely, the accusation of Bahá'í excomunications and takfirs centre on the very exceptional disenrolment, over several years of a very small handful of individuals by the Universal House of Justice on the grounds that their public statements and actions are not judged by that Supreme Institution to be compatible with membership in the Bahá'í community.

This same writer emphasizes at this same site that the voices that are arguing for radical, nefarious and highly pessimistic readings of these recent events have been taking place especially since the inception of this new paradigm. These voices raised in association with excommunication and covenant-breaking are speaking perfectly legitimately from within their own innevitably painful experience of these processes. If one looks beyond the painful crux of these encounters, though, one might see very much a natural, long term process of community development inherent in the nature of religious community itself. This process is not always harmonious; in the past it has been infinitely more explosive than is the case today, inspite of the very explosive tones in which protagonists of these tensions may address it. In the future the explosive tones, I'm sure, will be even more explosive for the process of community development, of growth and learning, is complex and is part and parcel with the very development of the Bahai community's contribution to the global civilization evolving all around us with a speed which we can scarcely comprehend.

This same writer goes on to say that the intense feeling expressed in much of the internet discussion with all of the arguably severe decisions of Bahá'í instituions is a far cry from the thundering jeremiads of Eusebius, the Spanish Inquisition, the witch hunts of James the VI, the fatwas and takfirs of Khomeini or the secular purges of Stalin and Mao---or even the comparatively tender and not-so-tender probings of the McCarthy era. It is perfectly correct, and hardly surprising in a society which allows no stone to go unturned, usually by a media culture wanting to get to the bottom of everything possible in the name of truth, publicity or ratings, to identify an area of tension in outlook and in the communication culture between the Universal House of Justice and those intellectuals who have run into this kind of conflict with this institution at the apex of Bahai administration.

Like so many aspects of this new paradigm, though, the nature of the conflict, the disagreement, the tension is not primarily doctrinal as processual, not primarily a content problem as a context one with a linguistic and casuistically centred focus--or so it seems to me as an observer at the end of the world down in the Antipodes about as far away from the Bahai World Centre in Haifa Israel as one can get on the planet unless one lives in Antarctica where, as yet, there are no Bahai communities. Mine is just one perspective on this highly complex subject, a perspective which I don't expect others to necessarily share. The dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion, of individual interpretation and community cohesion, of institutional authority and individual freedom, will remain with us for many a long year as they have been with us for more than 160 years. Such issues are part of any community's history, religious or secular. Within the first two decades of this new paradigm, though, the scenario is not one of extremism and not one of human rights violations. Nor is it the end of academic freedom for all Bahai academics. It is really a transitory yet painful, altogether mild and somewhat benign culmination of a process of competing discourses and identities within a constituted,institutionalised community setting. Of course for a few individuals, the experience is neither mind nor benign.

That within such a setting the perspective of a community's elected institutions should come to prevail is only to be expected. This is an inevitable outcome and should not be accompanied, notwithstanding the suggestions that this should be the case, by calls for attacks and hostilities. A respect for the conscience of dissenting individuals and for their right and freedom to express their thoughts on the matter especially if such individuals are outside of the community is and always has been a preferred course of action. The institutions have been elected to guide and indeed shape community processes and this is what they do, inevitably in the context of some opposition and some institutional estrangement for a small handful of members of the community. That is quite a natural phenomenon and should not surprise those who are even a little familiar with Bahai history over the last two centuries. That dissension and conflict arise from time to time is also natural and has been so in human society since those theoretical and mythological first individuals, Adam and Eve, when they represented both individual and society, both man and his institutions.

THE PROCESS OF REVIEW

The Bahai process of literary review, to focus briefly on what has often been experienced by Bahais who are writers as an uncomfortable and divisive process, as something often seen as unnecessary and certainly unwanted, is radically different from the experience of writers in the Catholic church. The concept of excommunication of writers whose views are outside the orthodox line has as its aim the forcing of a change of belief or action in the excommunicant. Its aim is often expressed through penance, thus infringing on the freedom of the writer's conscience. The consideration by an elected, constituted body that a set of individual statements and behaviour are incompatible with its criteria for membership does not carry with it a demand for a change of opinion, much less a call for penance. It is even farther removed from the catholic concept of anathema, which, in addition to the excommunication, condemns the anathemised person to everlasting hell.

One Bahá'í scholar has persuasively argued for the role of review in the future: "at this still formative stage in the world-wide development of the Bahá'í Faith when we seem to be on the verge of "entry by troops" in many parts of the world, I think it would prove unwise to do away with review at this time. As "entry by troops" continues to happen, we can envision all kinds of people entering the Bahá'í Faith–unity notwithstanding–amidst a great welter of cultural backgrounds, dissimilar attitudes and various temperaments. In the intellectual realm, such a mix can lead to powerful ideological storms which may serve to undermine the very unity the Bahá'í Faith aims to create.

Barney Leith had a different take on the issue as far back as the year before the beginning of this new paradigm. Leith pointed out in his excellent article: "Bahá'í Review: should the “red flag” law be repealed?"(Bahai Studies Review, Vol.5 No.1, 1995)that between 1878 and 1896 British law limited the speed of mechanical vehicles to 4 mph and insisted that each vehicle be preceded by a man with a red flag. Leith believed as far back as the mid-1990s that the provisions for review were in a "red flag" law situation. Traditional "vehicles", such as books, were subject to review (the man with the red flag). But, newer faster vehicles were increasingly coming into use. On the information super-highway the man with the red flag was in danger of being run over. In the last 15 years, he has indeed been run over.

The Universal House of Justice, in defending the continuation of the practice of review, now and into the future, has made the same moral appeal as did Shoghi Effendi. It has done this in a number of documents, notably in Individual Rights and Freedoms in the World Order of Bahá'u'lláh (of 29 December 1988), and in a letter dated 5 October 1993, written on behalf of the Universal House of Justice to an individual which restates the case for review in a specifically academic context. Some NSAs do not insist that writing and writers on the internet obey the red flag law.

In many respects the Bahá'í community is being decentralised and deregulated as it grows in size and maturity. Its diversity and plurality are increasingly being acknowledged. Greater emphasis is being placed by the House of Justice on the need for individual initiative, and institutions are learning how to facilitate rather than control Bahá'í activities. These are processes that will continue and become more pressing as the community grows explosively in many places. Many National Assemblies have recognized that it is no longer possible to try to control the kinds of things Bahá'ís publish about their Faith on the internet. The process of review has undergone radical change during this new paradigm.

Sincere Bahá'ís will always have "the dignity and unity of the Cause" at heart, even if they differ on how these are to be achieved. Responsible Bahá'í publishers of traditional printed matter and in the newer media will exercise, as most do now, editorial control and responsibility over what they publish. Attacks on the Faith can continue to be answered by individuals suitably briefed by the institutions or, indeed, by the institutions themselves and their agencies. The life and richness of the Bahá'í community has been greatly enhanced as it has been freed from review as a form of control. Individual Bahais like myself are now encouraged in this new paradigm to explore ways of using consultation, formally and informally within authorial and editorial teams, as well as between individuals and institutions and their agencies. New and exciting presentations of the Faith have resulted and the best interests of the Cause have been served.

THE TERM SPLINTER GROUP: NOT APPROPRIATE

There are today what some refer to as a number of Bahai splinter groups of one or a few people, who do not accept the Universal House of Justice as Head of the Faith. Their number in total is only a few, but cyberspace gives voice to these few and the impression is created of a Bahai house divided when, in reality, these splinter groups are so small as to hardly be worth a mention. Indeed, the word splinter, split, or fracture is not really appropriate; the word fragment is a fitting one for the infinitessimal, miniscule sliver or shavings. Still---impressions are impressions--however false. Cyberspace allows readers on the internet to see the sometimes bitter feelings possessed by members of these dots or traces on the landscape between these snipets or molecules and the main body of the Cause. These morsels or driblets serve as a living demonstration that unity is not created by the anarchous and divisive methods of a few.

It would be better for these numerically insignificant crumbs or dollups if they each focussed their energies on achieving good in the world rather than taking up the cudgels of opposition with those they really cannot agree with. The Bahai Cause possesses an authority, a legitimate one, followed by 99.9% of the community and they decide when enough is enough, and some opposing person is declared a covenant-breaker or loses his or her voting rights. Such an Authority is derived from a written Covenant and Its authorised interpreters. This Covenant finds its origins in the pen of Baha’u'llah. Baha’u'llah has already spoken and passed on. So even if individual members of these groups do abandon disputation and get on with demonstrating the virtue of their principles, the fate of these groups as a whole is sealed by the quandary they have put themselves in. They are smidgen on the scrap heap of history. After 160+ years the Bahai Cause is not a house divided in spite of appearances on the world-wide-web, appearances to the uninformed, to the contrary.

In a passage of the Guardian cited by the House of Justice in its letter on theocracy from 1995 makes clear:"...the mere fact of disaffection, estrangement, or recantation of belief, can in no wise detract from, or otherwise impinge upon, the legitimate civil rights of individuals in a free society, be it to the most insignificant degree. Were the friends to follow other than this course, it would be tantamount to a reversion on their part, in this century of radiance and light, to the ways and standards of a former age: they would reignite in men's breasts the fire of bigotry and blind fanaticism, cut themselves off from the glorious bestowals of this promised Day of God, and impede the full flow of divine assistance in this wondrous age."

The recent policy of disenrolment of a relatively few individuals, perhaps less than half a dozen on the planet, can be and is often cast in the rather inflammatory discourse of excommunication or takfir. I think a much closer parallel to this Bahai policy of disenrolment would be the much more common policy found in all kinds of voluntary associations. Sometimes policies of exclusion in many organizations result in acrimonious situations; sometimes they entail moral judgements and even metaphysical consequences; sometimes they require recantation associated with religious practices. This subject has many permutations and combinations, but I shall leave this subject for now. I could write more on this subject but I encourage readers to google the Bahai site entitled Epistolary with its excellent discussion on many a controversial issue.

THE COVENANT

Any discussion of this new paradigm must place the concept of the Covenant at the very centre of the discussion. Enunciated as "the most great characteristic of the revelation of Bahá’u’lláh, a specific teaching not given by any of the Prophets of the past", the Covenant signifies obedience to the successive ministries of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi and the agency of the Universal House of Justice to preserve the integrity of the Faith, maintain its unity and stimulate its world-wide expansion. By the process of written appointment and the provision of a legitimate succession the Bahai Faith has been safeguarded and protected against differences and schisms, making it impossible for anyone to create a new sect or faction of belief."(‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace 455-456)...The Universal House of Justice, the present trustees of the global undertaking which the events of Bahaullah's life set in motion has a much more complete and specific set of provisions in the matter of succession, in clear, explicit directions, in unequivocal and emphatic language. These facts, at the centre of all the Bahai paradigms of the past, remains at the centre of this one.

This new paradigm, this new organizational framework for action of the last two decades has been on the receiving end of the baneful forces of dissension, divisiveness, factionalism and inordinate criticism aimed at undermining the authority of the elected or appointed institutions of this Faith. Dissidence is a moral and intellectual contradiction of the main objective animating the Bahai community as the House pointed out back in 1988 when the word paradigm first came into their Ridvan messages. The notions of various categories of Bahais, informally institutionalized by using such terms as: conservative, liberal, progressive, reactionary and so forth, is but one of the results of much of the ill-directed criticism which dignifies conflict in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Obedience is a difficult art to learn in these times of individualism, a "I-Me-and-Mine" attitude and the seemingly ever-present concern with fulfilling one's potentiality.

"He who has learned how to obey, said the famous Greek poet and statesman Solon 600 years before Christ, "will know how to command." Solon embodied the cardinal Greek virtue of moderation. "Every individual man carries, within himself, at least in his adaptation and destination, a purely ideal man," wrote the German poet, philosopher and historian, Friedrich Schiller, "The great problem of his existence is to bring all the incessant changes of his outer life into conformity with the unchanging unity of this ideal(Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man). For the Bahai in this new paradigm as in previous paradigms such a purely ideal man has existed in the person of Abdul-Baha. The incessant changes of my outer life and this new outer paradigm I must now bring into conformity with this new paradigm--as all Bahais must in the decades ahead.

INDIVIDUAL CREATIVITY AND INITIATIVE

There is a strong place in this new paradigm, as there has been in all previous paradigms, for the place of individual initative, creativity and an unbounded confidence in the powers of human rationality and science. The intellectual foundations of the Enlightenment, an eighteenth-century philosophical movement characterized by rationalism, a trust in reason, empiricism, a trust in the senses, and scepticism, a trust in mistrust or doubt, that is, a refusing to believe in anything without good evidence are part of how an individual like myself puts this paradigm into practice in his life. The Enlightenment faith in progress, science and reason which the Bahai is able to put at the centre of his philosophy due to the general Bahai teachings forms only part of the philosophy of this paradigm, however, it seems to me. I often feel a little like the main characters in the original series of Star Trek and The Next Generation, such as Spock and Picard, who constantly reveal a belief in dispassionate logic and a trust in technological or scientific solutions to problems. But I also am strongly influenced, as many characters in that series were, by their awareness of philosophical or religious answers and an awareness of the place of intuition and spirituality exemplified by Counsellor Deanna Troi. I don't want to push this analogy too far but, it seems to me, that this new paradigm has very eclectic aspects, aspects that enable each individual to work out their role in their own ways.

When every human being is the judge of the norms of his life-style and of the social order, and when there is no recognition of an authority which cannot be questioned. When social utility and reason is substituted for tradition as the main criterion of social institutions and values, egotism grows as does the spread of pessimism and a concern only for getting the best for oneself. Udo schaefer discusses this aspect of modern society, an aspect which this new paradigm attempts to counter. But it is an uphill battle because for millions the sense of purpose once provided by religion has been replaced by a sociological interpretation of existence, a sort of political messianism, in which hope is now placed in everything but religion: science, technology, political parties, democracy, socialism, inter alia. We are seen as social beings not as beings created by God with no relationship, therefore, to any transcendent reality. To compound the problem for the Bahá'í trying to implement this new paradigm, he must deal with the many who espouse religious views which possess a mythologized and irrelevant eschatology. The mind of modern man cannot accept so much of the baggage of the old religions and the transcendent retreats from the social sphere into a private realm(The Imperishable Dominion, p.14)

One final note I want to strike here is the importance of confidence in the ultimate success of the venture on which we are embarked. We may, and inevitable will, fail many times along the way, But the overall success of the Plan at the centre of our efforts is assured.

STILL EARLY DAYS AND ENDLESS MEETINGS

As one Bahai writer put it recently: The majority of local Bahá'í communities, and many, if not all, national Bahá'í communities are really embryonic entities, with very crude systems, agencies and organisations in place, a limited number of individuals and families, as well as few subsidiary institutions to speak of beyond a Local Spiritual Assembly, the Nineteen Day Feast and, perhaps, a host of committees and elected and appointed members in a variety of roles. “The Order brought by Bahá’u’lláh is intended to guide the progress and resolve the problems of society,” the Universal House of Justice states, but "our numbers are as yet too small to effect an adequate demonstration of the potentialities inherent in the administrative system we are building; and the efficacy of this system will not be fully appreciated without a vast expansion of our membership.” Compared to the earliest years of Bahai administration, say, up to 1936 when the first formal, organized and systematic teaching Plan was initiated, the current administration of Bahai affairs is far from embryonic. But the contrast between the present development of this Bahai administration, this nucleus and pattern of a future world order, and its development in the fullness of time is so stark that it is necessary to apply the word 'embryonic' to the present form of its operation and activities in all countries, regions, cities and towns. However stark the contrast, the main foundations of this new world Order, this new structure for society, this new elan, are being laid within the framework of this paradigm and it will be laid on the ruins of this present lamentably defective political and religious orthodoxy that has its pervasive hold over the thoughts and consciences of men.

Often believers live under assumptions that endless meetings and activity will somehow, as one writer, put it, "save the day." These are, as I say above, still early days in the establishment of this new Order. In many places, if not most, the Faith was introduced virtually just the other day on the horizon of history. Bahai administration could be said to be still in its first century. Balance, harmony and a relaxed attitude to things, though, are not easy to achieve when one is engaged in what are often long hours of commitments both inside and outside Bahai community life, when one has a desire to achieve great things in ones personal life and in the life of the Bahai community and when one also has to deal with the mundane realities of everyday existence.

We, the generations of the half-light, are fortunate to be born into epochs in which the challenges have been tremendous, the experiences of our time momentous and the tasks set for us in this Cause are aimed at producing an effect on our fellow man, by the impact of will upon will.

One of the challenges that has faced me and the Bahais whereever I have lived in both Canada and Australia for half a century has been the lack of significant numerical growth in our communities. This has been true in many Western and Eastern lands. Concerns about the lack of enrolments expressed by many Bahais, as the House of Justice expressed some eight years ago to a believer in a state of some anxiety over this issue, is largely accurate and fully justified. To see important Bahai communities markedly lacking in the development of the human resources required to reach populations desperately searching for solutions to the crisis in which society is sinking is painful indeed to believers aware of the potency of Bahaullahs Message, the House went on to say.

This consideration was an important element in the drafting of the relevant sections of the document "Century of Light(2000)." Some of the passages of that document attempted to acquaint believers everywhere with the profound change in Bahai culture that the preceding decades of struggle, achievement and disappointment made possible and that was capitalized on through the agency of the Four Year Plan(1996-2000). The culture emerging in this new Bahai paradigm, the House went on to say, was one in which groups of Bahaullahs followers explored together the truths in His Teachings, freely opened their study circles, devotional gatherings and children's classes to their friends and neighbours, and invested their efforts confidently in plans of action designed at the level of the cluster, that makes growth a manageable goal. The enthusiasm with which Bahai communities in most parts of the world responded to this challenge, and the results their efforts brought have been a source of great joy to the House of Justice. This was already true in 2002 and is even more true in 2010.

The analysis found in that document Century of Light explained to some extent the seeming impasse reflected in unrealistic expectations on the part of many Bahais in those decades after 1963. Those difficult decades have now triggered a new culture of learning and change. Many believers by the 1990s were unable to see meaning or purpose in the seeming impasse of those difficult decades. These believers saw themselves as inhabitants of spiritually barren lands, as incapable of dealing with the mass indifference to their efforts, and members of altogether disfunctional local and national, and sometimes even international Bahá'í communities.

As the 1970s became the 1980s and decade followed decade discouragement set in to the spirits of many a believer. Desperate exhortations to teach the Faith and a sense of urgency was accompanied by an element of despondency or resentment. Many strong and faithful Bahá'ís chose to become inactive in the community on account of their perceptions of dysfunctionality. Steadfast perseverance in the teaching work was accompanied by an inner hoplessness and lack of expectation. There were frequent manifestations of disunity as Bahais sought answers to this question in the abilities and deeds of one another. By the 1990s these perspectives coalesced into systematic critiques of the community in internet fora and academic publications.

All the plans since the outset of this new paradigm in 1996 have been designed as progressive steps in achieving a change of Bahá'í culture. The Four Year Plan(1996-2000), the Twelve Month Plan(2000-2001) and then four Five Year Plans(2001-2006, 2006-2011, 2011-2016 and 2016-2021)are, in fact, seven of these progressive steps. The Continental Boards of Counsellors around the world have been intensely engaged in assisting National and Local Spiritual Assemblies, Regional Councils and other administrative bodies to understand the goals involved and to devise strategies for their achievement. Large-scale consultative sessions that have brought together the members of all of these key institutions have, in most cases, been particularly successful in achieving this objective. Where response has lagged, the House of Justice frequently has intervened to reinforce the efforts of the Counsellors by clarifying issues. Ultimately, the responsibility for ensuring that their own community arises to the challenge must rest with the elected representatives of the believers, at local and national levels.

Of course, one must add that, in the end, the individual believer must arise whatever the administrative apparatus exists behind the scenes. This new paradigm has been aimed at the individual and, after 15 years, great changes have taken place. This book discusses these changes, not so much in a systematic way, but from time to time as various themes arise.

The advancement of the Cause is an evolutionary process which takes place through trial and error, through reflection on experience and through wholehearted commitment to the teaching Plans and strategies devised by the House of Justice. Believers, like you and I, who appreciate the opportunities thus provided in this new paradigm, can be of great assistance by encouraging their respective countries and assemblies to similarly invest themselves in the process. And if they are unable to do those things they must each act in their own respective spheres of life.

A SEA-CHANGE: BUILDING INSTITUTIONS AND COMMUNITIES

The fourth(1986-2001) and particularly the fifth epochs(2001 to 2021) of the Cause are witnessing a sea-change in the areas of institution and community building as local communities generate a broad infrastructure of “systems, agencies and organisations” arising singly and collaboratively from the individuals and families who make up the membership. I refer of course to the development of study-circles, mostly focused around individuals; the development of children's(5-11) and junior youth(12-14) classes, mostly revolving around families, Bahá'í and others; devotional meetings which, with socio-economic development activities, can be seen as the seeds of future local Mashriq’u’l-Adhkars; the ever-evolving training institutes in each country; and where these elements are in place, socio-economic development projects, increasingly a spontaneous, organic feature of Bahai community clusters in process of intensive growth," as outlined in the letter written by the Universal House of Justice to the Counsellors of January 9, 2001.

As one writer put it and very succinctly: if the second and third epochs of the Cause were about building institutions, then the fourth and fifth epochs have been and are about building communities. Clearly, again, the aim is not merely to generate an increased flow of individual enrolments or fill-up vacant LSA spaces, but also and above all, to instil into the emerging communities of the fifth epoch a sense of interdependence, whereby a given community will work organically and inherently for the welfare of its own locality and of localities “beyond its own borders”. To the well-known Bahá'í notion of the “locality” we now, therefore, add the compass of a “cluster” of localities to which one also belongs and with whom one systematically interacts and builds community. That this process will not take place at the same speed, with the same effectiveness and efficiency everywhere on earth, in all the 16,000 clusters should be as obvious as the sun in the sky. To expect otherwise is not only unrealistic it betrays a sad lack of understanding of the immense complexity of the process that is taking place across the planet, a complexity that requires, as the House emphasized in its Ridvan 2010 message, that NSA's "think and act strategically" and learn "to analysethe community-bulding processes at the grassroots with increasing acuity." By 2016 some 11,000 of the 16,000 clusters on the planet will still have little growth, in all likelihood, given both recent patterns of the last several decades and the goals that have already been set for 2016.

As the Bahá’í community has moved from one stage to the next, the range of activities that it has been able to undertake has increased. Its growth has been organic in nature and has implied gradual differentiation in functions. When the Bahá’í community was small in size, all of its interactions with society at large easily fitted together under the designation of direct and indirect teaching. But, over time, new dimensions of work appeared--involvement in civil society, highly organized diplomatic work, social action, and so on-- each with its own aims, methods and resources. In a certain sense, it is possible to refer to all of these activities as teaching, since their ultimate purpose is the diffusion of the divine fragrances, the offering of Bahá’u’lláh’s Revelation to humankind, and service to society. In the new culture of learning and growth it is also possible to refer to all of the activities as service. As Albert Schweitzer once wrote: "the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve." this could very well be a motto for this new paradigm. In practice and certainly for statistical purposes, though, it is more fruitful to treat the various activities as distinct but complementary lines of action.

In all of this social and community activity the individual has what might be called a dual relation. He or she is both and at the same time standing within and outside the community. The unity comes in what at some levels might be seen as logically contradictory relations. Harmony and conflict, attraction and repulsion, ambivalence and enthusiasm, creativity and routine. The members of the community as producers both lose themselves in the products, the interaction and they are separate. The heterogeneity is too extensive to assimilate, to fully integrate. Heterogeneity is part of the reality, the drama, of community and it is engaged in to whatever extent the individual wishes, is capable of handling and is socially oriented. Sometimes the group is rejected and the individual withdraws; sometimes it is endured within the capacity of the endurer; sometimes the individual slips to the periphery; sometimes he is fully alive to the group and intensely involved. Everyone has their own style and level of engagement.

Of the approximately 200 sovereign-states in the world, over 160 are culturally heterogeneous, and they are comprised of 5000 ethnic groups. Between 10 and 20% of the world's population currently belongs to a racial/linguistic minority in their country of residence. Nine hundred million people affiliate with groups that suffer systematic discrimination. Perhaps three-quarters of the world system sees politically active minorities, and there are more than 200 movements for self-determination, spread across nearly 100 states. It is useful to describe this global context within which the new Bahai paradigm exists and has its being.

The structure of the new paradigm can act as a constraint on action, but it also enables action by providing common frames of meaning. The individual is surrounded by a community which paradoxically both constrains and influences his needs and deeds on the one hand and liberates him from the bonds of attachment and dependencies on the other. The individual is faced with these polarities. His social, geographical and physical life shapes his spiritual life and vice-versa. As David Reisman, the author of the Lonely Crowd, put it at the start of the Ten Year Crusade in the most popular social science book of the last half-century, heterogeneity is our problem. To put the problem a little differently: other people are our problem or hell is other people to put it as far as possible in the negative, as Albert Camus once put it. People are also, of course, our heaven and our culture of learning and growth. For most of us it is a question of balance, of getting our interaction capacities and potentials, our skills and abilities, expressed in the way that is both best for us and best for others. This balancing process is, it could be argued and it is by some theorists, the basis of our individuality, our individualism. For most of us this process keeps us busy working it out, adjusting it in our changing lives and their changing conditions.

The culture of learning and growth is like a bridge that anchors the individual in continuous relationships and overcomes his separateness. A good bridge within this culture, a good relationship sometimes takes years to establish and sometimes it seems instantaneous. Human beings are bridge-builders within their cultures of learning and growth. These bridges transcend their separateness; they unite what is separate. They are not built for economic reasons within this culture of learning, although sometimes they are. The bridges are built within their minds and hearts. They make them responsible to each other in ways they would not otherwise be obligated. These are some of the tissues of this new paradigm. They are not unlike the tissues of old paradigms but the patterns and processes of engagement are different.

The wholeness that each person experiences is a construction of the mind and comes from the will to relate. How often an individual crosses the bridge and in what way is dependent on each person. The picture is one of endless fragments. To create a sense of wholeness and synthesis is the task of the individual and to achieve this the Bahai institutions and the community are there to assist and, in the process, make a Bahai society. To reach our goals we all proceed along increasingly long and difficult paths, as Shoghi Effendi once wrote, paths that are tortuous and stony. The connection between ends and means is often elusive, veiled, obscured and sometimes lost entirely. In community life compassion and love not power hold the keys to dealing with, if not overcoming, egotism. But the process is far from simple. There is a strange mixture in this culture of learning and growth of selfless devotion and desire, of humility and elation, of sensual immediacy and spiritual abstraction, of piety and faith and it is this mixture of ingredients in the context of the Covenant than makes Bahai society possible.

There are also doors and locks in our culture of learning and growth. Doors open us to endless possibilities of relationship and locks which keep people out and prevent our inundation. Our new paradigm has faces and windows and each of us creates their own world of faces and windows. Sometimes there are bars on the windows; sometimes individuals want more faces and sometimes less. I have drawn on Georg Simmel(1858-1918) for the analysis of group interaction, the sociology, the metaphors and insights that he provides to help me in my understanding of some of the dimensions of this new paradigm. I have really only touched the surface, only begun to explore the implications of his writing, his ways of analysing people and groups, his sociological constructions.

DRAWING ON BAH'I AND SECULAR WRITERS

I have also drawn on other writers, both Bahais and others. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin(1909-1997) for example says that injustice, poverty, slavery and ignorance may be cured by reform or revolution and there are millions in the world trying to fight these evils. "But men," he emphasizes, "do not live only by fighting evils. They also live by positive goals, individual and collectiveones, indeed a vast variety of them, seldom predictable and at times incompatible."(Four Essays on Liberty) This new paradigm provides a vast variety of goals for Bahais. Often the results are unpredictable and often, too, in the eyes of some of the Bahais they seem incompatible. I would argue, though, that this new paradigm provides an organic, an integrated, mix of goals that everyone can play a part somewhere, in some context, in achieving. That historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin also wrote that: "There exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.(The Hedgehog and the Fox)In this new culture of learning and growth the hedgehog and the fox can work together.

This new paradigm makes allowance for human idiosyncrasy and what the English essayist William Hazlitt was talking about when he wrote that: "Perhaps the weak side of his conclusions also is, that he has carried this single view of his subject too far, and not made sufficient allowance for the varieties of human nature, and the caprices and irregularities of the human will. 'He has not allowed for the wind'...it might be plausibly objected that he had struck the whole mass of fancy, prejudice, passion, sense, whim, with his petrific, leaden mace, that he had 'bound volatile Hermes,' and reduced the theory and practice of human life to a caput mortuum of reason, and dull, plodding, technical calculation." This new paradigm is no "petrific leaden mace," although some, it seems to me in the first 15 years of its implementation have made it into a "dull, plodding technical calculation" and have bound that volatile Hermes in a single construct. This tendency to over-simplification is very human, very natural and we should not be surprised when we see it expressed in community consultations.

THE MICRO-MACRO SCALE AND IDENTITY

The paradigm structures with its institutions, its moral incentives, its sets of expectations and its established ways of doing things provide a stable activity core. But they can be and are changed, especially through the unintended consequences of action and as a result of people ignoring the explicit routines and principles, replacing them or reproducing them differently as inevitably happens in everyday life. On a micro-scale, the scale of individuals' internal sense of self and identity, individuals are free to choose what activities they will engage in and how to relate to these activities. it is not a prison of processes. This tendency to work out individually unique activities within the larger, the overall, pattern of the paradigm, often creates new opportunities. The relationship of the individual to the community often becomes a reflexive, introspective project that has to be continuous interpreted and maintained, revised and redefined. These micro-level changes cannot be explained only by looking at the individual level.

I don't want to get into the many permutations and combinations of the concept of identity but one of its more common concepts is that identity is a ceaselessly evolving entity and, in some ways, less an entity, less something that can be defined, and more a kind of awareness, an ongoing process of redefinition. Autobiography, then, when viewed in such a context becomes a pattern and meaning in a life at the time of writing. The part one plays in this new paradigm, this new culture of learning, then, can be seen as part of this way of looking at one's identity and the narrative that is one's life. It is not a static process but always going on both within the individual and in his wider community. One could also say, as a concluding note here, that this process is part of the phenomenon that continually gives birth to the self or a congeries of selves. This notion is too complex to deal with in detail here and I trust these few comments will suffice to raise some questions about the area of our lives where we try to have some power over our destiny, our choices, what we do with our lives. In the Cause, in this new paradigm, the individual Bahai has an extensive menu of activity from which to choose.

There is also the macro-level and this paradigm must be analysed on a macro scale, on a scale outside the individual and a scale that encompasses the entire globe and directly influences individuals often unbeknownst to them. A serious explanation of the processes within this paradigm must lie somewhere within the network of macro and micro forces. These different levels cannot be treated separately. They are in fact revealed as having significant influence upon each other and cannot really be understood if studied in isolation. This book deals with this complex interaction, although not as systematically as I'd like and as I may do as this book evolves here at BLO.

In the end the individual is faced with the everpresent questions: What will I do? What should I do? How should I act? Who will I try to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of these years of late modernity. They are questions which, on some level or another, all of us answer all our lives and through our day-to-day social behaviour. Individuals and institutions, it would appear to me, now require much more analysis and thought before they take action than ever before. We all are involved in different ways now in piloting our way through the major revolutions of our time: globalisation, transformations in personal life and our relationship to nature. That these revolutions are essentially spiritual is one of the assumptions of this new paradigm and not one easily transmitted to a secular culture and the diverse interest groups within it, groups with assumptions highly at variance with those of this new paradigm.

THE DANISH RENNER PROJECT

The Danish RENNER project is a research network on the study of new religions. This research network, which is supported by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities, has been active since 1992. In 1998, a new grant from the Research Council resulted in a specific study on new religions and globalisation. A project was initiated with several separate studies of new age religion and globalisation. The book, Baha’i and Globalisation, which is the seventh volume of the book series Renner Studies on New Religion, is the second of the case studies of the project. Another book, which emphasises the theoretical and methodological aspects of the study of new religions and globalisation, will be volume eight in the series, rounding off this special RENNER topic. Globalisation is the conventional term used to describe the present,rapid integration of the world economy facilitated by the innovations and growth in international electronic communications particularly during the last two decades.

In one of the chapters of that 7th volume, Denis MacEoin pointed to the triumphalist aspect of the Baha’is’self-understanding as representing the religion to unite all religions in the culmination of globalisation. However, on the path ahead lie issues of secularism, and MacEoin discusses the challenges which secular values present to a religion that, rooted in Islamic thinking, aims to fuse the spheres of religion and society. Still this book, the first anthology in Baha’i studies that deals with globalisation is a sign of things to come within this new paradigm.

MAKING CONNECTIONS AND THE BURGEONING OF PRINTED MATTER

When asked what he thought of conveying the truths of the Cause in the form of writing fiction, Shoghi Effendi's secretary replied on his behalf: "He would not recommend fiction as a means of teaching; the condition of the world is too acute to permit of delay in giving them the direct teachings, associated with the name of Bahaullah. But any suitable approach to the Faith, which appeals to this or that group, is certainly worthy of effort, as we wish to bring the Cause to all men, in all walks of life, of all mentalities."(Shoghi Effendi in a letter written to an individual believer on 23 March 1945 in Writers and Writing, p. 412) This has been my own MO, as it were, since I joined the Cause in the late 1950s. Reaching and meeting the mentalities of men and women from all walks of life is not easy. To achieve this with any degree of success has been a challenge in this or any paradigm that has been at the centre of Bahai life. Part of the quintessential problem, it has always seemed to me, especially since I am a professional teacher and since I have now spent fifty years in classrooms dealing with printed matter in one form or another, is that the Bahai community, the Bahai Faith, is a religion of The Book, par excellence.

Printed matter is at the core of Bahai experience and the growth of this Faith is taking place, as some argue, in a society that has been in many basic ways moving very forcefully toward an aural, an audio-visual culture. Print does not turn millions on in anything like the same ways that video, cinema, hi-fidelity sound systems, radio and the apparatus of a whole electronic industry does. I don't want to deal with this issue in any detail since the field involved is indeed very complex and a whole literature has grown up which analyses the permutations and combinations that surround the core of the social changes involved. But the paradigm change the Bahai Faith has been going through and will go through in the years ahead can not ignore this complex sociological and psychological phenomenon of a vast print and electronic media. Ironically, of course, much of the large and significant growth patterns are not in the so-called educated West but in the third world. The question, the issue of the basic learning mode that turns people on, the basic styles of print that people turn to in their daily lives for stimulation and entertainment, is a complex one and outside the scope of this book to deal with in any detail. But the quantitative successes, the statistical increases, within this new paradigm in many locations are in part at least bound up with this issue.

Since the mid-1990s there has emerged a paradigmatic shift in communications technology. Children born after 1995, at least in the affluent West, live in a fluid, connected, always-on, digital ecology of hybrid intercommunicating forms, messages, content and activities: personalised, individually and immediately available. It is a world controllable and manipulable at will and feeding-into, promoting or giving rise to personal production, content and meaning-creation. This generation of the digital ‘post-broadcast’ era, their media world and their experiences are radically different from my generation, the war-babies and the baby boomers at their age. Their world is not entirely different; they may still be watching Star Wars and Doctor Who, but a chasm separates the childhoods of this new generation and those of the past, those born before the mid-1990s, before the onset of this new paradigm.

As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes of this digital generation, it is “liquid” or “fluid” and is representative of much of contemporary life. As opposed to many of the solidities of the past, this more fluid culture, more fluid environment of the last two decades, the years of this new paradigm, has far-reaching consequences for the social sphere. An even greater individualism and a more fractured society as well as a freedom from social “bonds,” and an increased inability to connect meaningfully with others has produced a need to constantly adapt or transform according to one's social environment. This last feature, the ability to become socially malleable and fit into multiple social situations becomes, perhaps, the most valued personal commodity of this state of “liquidity.” This new culture of learning and growth caters to this more fluid social world.

Web-publishing also represents a paradigm change since the mid-1990s. This essay or book has now been seen by thousands of people and it has got nowhere near a publisher or, for that matter, a Bahai reviewing committee. By the time a book has been written and passed through a series of readers, editors and proofreaders to make it to the shops where it is eventually noticed, bought, read, reviewed and quoted, years can have passed by. Today the media world moves very fast. Web-publishing allows for cheap, instant, global publication. It allows for faster, updateable commentary, for freer expression, more original ideas, more debate, real feedback, rapid responses to the world and ongoing critical dialogue. Even if this new form doesn’t replace books, web-publishing is taking subjects to the world and throws out faster, draft responses to new developments. It engages people more directly with each other and challenges and pushes the field forward. This is all part of the new paradigm change in the Bahai community. It is also part of my own engagement and participation in the new Bahai paradigm. It is a very rich, satisfying and meaningful interaction and it was not even possible before the mid 1990s when this paradigm got off the ground.

THE WORK OF ESSAY WRITING AND WRITING A BOOK

Half the work of essay writing or writing a book is finding surprises, curious juxtapositions, arresting metaphors and clever turns of phrase that readers can enjoy, readers who have become used to having their senses titillated and their minds stimulated with little to no effort on their part. The other half of the work in writing essays or writing in any genre is knowing a good deal about the subject one is writing about, the subject one is bringing to the attention of readers. As writers go about this dual-role, this two-sided field of work, they often see themselves as proxies, as people acting for their readers, as agents or substitutes for their readers. They also try to write about things they've thought about a lot. They aim for good ideas, but good ideas are not always easy to come by. Good ideas can often be funny because the connection may be a surprise. Surprises often make people laugh and surprises are what some writers, at least this one, wants to deliver.

A person who has thought about a topic a lot, will probably, will hopefully, surprise at least some of his readers. Surprises are things that not only the writer did not know, but they are also things that often contradict what a writer thought he or she knew. For this reason they're one of the most valuable sorts of facts a writer can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things the person has already eaten. Some of the most interesting surprises are unexpected connections between different fields. Making people laugh in my writing and coming up with surprises are not skills with which I feel particularly endowed. Readers of my various works must put up with a high seriousness more than humour and plain talk rather than a good layering of surprises. I often aim for things in my writing that I do not achieve; the process is not unlike much of my work in the Bahai community. Some goals one achieves and some one does not. Some things one can change and some one cant and, hopefully, one has the wisdom to know the difference as the Alcoholics Anonymous organization emphasizes time and again in their literature.

Here are two examples of the kind of surprise and interesting juxtapositions I am talking about. Firstly: jam, bacon, pickles and cheese, which are among the most pleasing of foods, were all originally intended as methods of preservation. Books and paintings are also methods of preservation. A writer, if he or she is clever enough, could play with this juxtaposition and be quite entertaining. I leave it to readers here to try this one on for size and see what they can do to bring into literary creation some surprising turn of phrase--and do this in relation to this new paradigm. For a second example: Oscar Wilde said that human beings often make the mistake so common among the English that of degrading truth into facts. Wilde complained in a newspaper article he had published in 1894 entitled "Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated," that: "When a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value." Of course, not everyone will get the surprise or appreciate the juxtaposition. In writing, as in life, one only wins some of the time.

Due to this notion of surprise, juxtaposition and metaphor, I make comparisons and contrasts between this new paradigm and insects, plants, human development and evolution. I hope readers enjoy these extensions into wider worlds as I travel, as they travel with me. Enjoying the provocative nature of this quotation from Oscar Wilde and seeing some truth in what he is saying, I try to get behind the multitude of facts within this new paradigm. Sadly or not so sadly, this book has many of these so-called facts, but I trust I have given them an engendering, an enriching, perspective, a renewed intellectual value. One can have lofty hopes and high aims and I hope, for the sake of the readers who travel with me for these 190,000 words, they get a payoff for their time spent.

If there's one piece of advice I try to implement when writing it is: don't do what you're told like some parrot; avoid imitation and its loathsome odours; don't believe what alot of others have told you to believe and what they think you are supposed to believe. Don't write the essay or book that readers are expecting to read. Readers often learn little to nothing from what they expect. And, finally, don't write the way someone taught you to do back in school. The internet may well make our age the golden age of the essay, the book and many other literary form. It may also help to make it a dark age since so much of the stuff on the internet has a high degree of literary illiteracy. There are wonderful examples, models, exemplars, mentors, out there on the world-wide-web, more than the writing and reading world has ever enjoyed. Sadly and at the same time, as I say, there are piles and piles of garbage that readers must learn to avoid as they look for the flowers, the gems and the wisdom embedded in printed matter.

After fifty years of learning and teaching English and after nearly 15 years of reading the essays and the books of others on the web as well as writing a few of my own, perhaps something of the skills in using this language has rubbed off. Perhaps I have found some gems and flowers. I leave it to each individual reader to make their own assessment as inevitably they do and will in the years ahead. I hope for your sake dear reader that you find some pleasure here. I have received much praise and have for decades; the examples of written encomiums, had I saved them, would fill a small book; but I have also received my share of opprobrium. I have been advised to take classes in writing, to simplify my writing and to write less. Had I taken the advice, the criticism, I have received seriously I would have stopped writing long ago. One can only please some of the people some of the time and not everyone's style and method of writing suits the taste of every reader. I have my enthusiastic readership and I have my detractors. This was true when I was a student and teacher of English for fifty years and I have no doubt it will be true until I am called up yonder and go to the place where, I anticipate, there will be no more writing and talking. But who knows, eh?

I am certainly conscious of much rubbing and polishing of the writing process in my personal life as I look back over my writing since the late 1940s when the Bahai Faith was about to go through a paradigm shift in the remaining years of the then Seven Year Plan(1946-1953) and the Ten Year Crusade(1953-1963), a paradigm shift which took its teachings to the four corners of the planet for the first time, saw the Mother temple in the West completed and its holy places in Israel embellished beyond anything they had enjoyed in their century-long history.

As a writer and editor, as an essayist and critic, as an analyst and commentator I have inherited several traditions and read the works of many who have set a high standard for my own work. Many of those whom I read possess that rare gift of capturing the vitality of their own experience of life and art and of making their readers richer for sharing that experience. I hope I achieve some of this rare writing gift to give to readers.

LACK OF INTEREST IN THIS PARADIGM BY OTHERS

The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov wrote that his scientific papers on butterflies, an area in which he possessed some expertise, had absolutely no interest whatever for the layman and little to no interest to most scientists. He was expressing both his pride as much as his melancholy in relation to this topic. This book on the new Bahai paradigm has no interest whatever to the vast majority of people who know little about the Bahai Faith and/or take little interest in it. Even for the 5 to 7 million Bahais, several million of these members are not on the internet and several million of those who are will never read this article. So much that is written in the wide-wide world is inevitably for a coterie; it is useful to keep this reality of literary life in mind as one goes about the exercise of expatiating in written form on some topic of personal interest. Such a view helps to provide perspective, balance and a sense of detachment from what one is describing and analysing. I do not anticipate changing the world with these words. As much as the idea of being a major agent of change has its appeal to my sense of personal meaning, my sense of achievement in life and some of the goals I have lived with for over half a century, I goabout this writing quietly in my study, post it on the internet and wait. My mother used to say to me: "boy, most of life is waiting." I have slowly come to appreciate my other's wisdom is this and many areas as the decades have rolled on.

I have had several thousand "hits" or "clicks" on my article in the last two years but given that success in our modern age at many a site, at many a video site like U-tube is often measured in the millions, this piece of writing, this exposure of an idea is in the minor leagues to use a baseball metaphor. But there are some readers out there, perhaps more than if this article/book had found a place in a hard or soft-covered journal or magazine, bulletin or newsletter. Such is the mystery and the wonder of the internet, of cyberspace. I have no list of the readers any more than someone who writes a book knows the names of those who buy his books. But it's immensely rewarding to think that so many people, from such farflung places, have found this book. Of course, a click has many meanings and one should be aware of the possible low end of the spectrum where readers simply turn you off right at the start of their reading journey through your extended and extensive piece of writing, however constructive, however self-obsessed or however significant your writing may be.

THE NEW BAHA'I PARADIGM: SOME INITIAL COMMENTS

Paradigm shifts do not take place easily because they involve a change in basic assumptions within the current and dominant theory of operations and activities in whatever field in which they occur. My hope is that this piece of writing may play one of the thousands of incremental or microcosmic, sensible or insensible, significant or minor, parts in a process which is now well into its second decade(1996-2006) and (2006-2016). At the outset I would like to thank Moojan Momen for his useful and critical essay which was instrumental in creating the first stages of serious discussion of this paradigmatic shift in Bahai community life. Back in the early years of this new millennium, in the first decade of what has become an ongoing dialogue about this new culture of learning, Momen started some balls rolling, so to speak. The tide is now turning to an appreciation of the significance of this new paradigm after some initial but not always moderate, balanced or realistic criticisms of its context and content.

My own experience as a Bahai has undergone a paradigmatic shift in the last two decades and especially the first ten years of my retirement from full-time work, 1999 to 2009, coinciding as my retirement has with the first years in the shift in the wider Bahai community. Experience, it has been said, is the name people give to their mistakes and after forty years of experience as a Bahai(1959-1999) I made plenty of them. My work on the internet and the direct teaching done in this connection and five weeks spent at the Bahai World Centre in that same decade have altered the focus of my Bahai experience as I entered the first years(60-65) of late adulthood as human development psychologists call the years from 60 to 80.

According to Thomas Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share."(The Essential Tension, 1977). In the case of this Bahai paradigm it is one shared by the international Bahai community--and it alone. A paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it. It is based on features of a landscape of knowledge that scientists can identify around them. There are anomalies for all paradigms, Kuhn maintained, that are brushed away as acceptable levels of error or simply ignored and not dealt with. And this, it seems to me, is also the case with this paradigm of change in the Bahai community. The comparisons and contrasts with paradigms that scientists deal with in the scientific community and which Kuhn is concerned with are apt, are relevant, in relation to this study of the Bahai paradigm.

When enough significant anomalies have accrued against a current paradigm, the scientific discipline is thrown into a state of crisis, according to Kuhn. It seems to me, again, that the previous Bahai paradigm, the dominant one until 1996, the one that operated for virtually all of the years of this tenth stage of history(1963-1996), if not all of the years as far back as the beginning of the formal implementation of the Teaching Plan in 1937, had grown outworn if not in a state of crisis. During this crisis, a crisis that had gradually come into the Bahai community sensibly and insensibly for perhaps two or three decades, new ideas, perhaps ones previously discarded, were tried. Indeed the Bahai community that set out in 1996 within the framework for action of this new paradigm capitalized on the insights gained and the resources that had been developed during the Plans as far back as the first one within which my own life had been experienced: the Ten Year Crusade.

A new paradigm, especially during the time of its initial appearance and formulation, does not simply replace, reject or invalidate the preceding one. For this reason, the previous paradigm, although clearly in something of a state of crisis, can still be useful, albeit in a highly restricted capacity and circumscribed situation. Within Newtonian physics, for example, what is true and what is false, is determined by the entities, rules, and conditions that come to be exhibited within the Newtonian system. As long as one operates inside the framework or ‘paradigm’ of this system, it is possible to define what is and what is not valid for the Newtonian characterization of physical reality. All this changes, of course, when the normal functioning of Newtonian science is confronted with an alternative, like that formulated by Albert Einstein. Einstein’s innovations, however, do not invalidate or foreclose Newtonian physics. They simply reinscribe Newton’s laws within a different context that reveals other entities, rules, and conditions that could not be conceptualized as such within the horizon of Newton’s theorizing. In an analogous way, the change in paradigm that has been in place and developing in the Bahai community since the mid-1990s does not disprove or simply put an end to Bahai community activity that went before 1996. That would be absurd. Instead the new paradigm redefines Bahai activity as a highly specific set of ways and means for what needs to be a much more comprehensive understanding of the role and function of the individual, the community and its institutions. This should come as no surprise to the Bahais now after 15 years experience of this new paradigm. In fact, the Bahais already know this for the most part and currently operate within this new perspective, even if they do not always acknowledge it as such, understand all the new dynamics of this paradigm or are able to articulate all the newness in all its forms.

The Bahai community has always achieved many, if not most, of the quantitative goals it set itself during each Plan; it often struggled in vain to reach some of the lofty qualitative goals. So is this often the case in individual lives. Each of the Central Figures of this Cause experienced great disappointment in Their lives, disappointment that this Faith, the Faith They had initiated or inherited, had not spread faster and that, in the process of its extension in Iran and then throughout other countries, sadness that much suffering had resulted in the process of that extension. More recently and in my own lifetime, high expectations of the decades, say, from 1956 to 1996, led to disappointments because these high expectations did not yield their hoped-for results. They were simply unrealistic expectations based on inadequate understanding of the Bahai community itself and the wider society in general. The several successes that did occur in the West, first in the early years of the Ten Year Plan and then in the Nine Year Plan, among other successes in other parts of the global Bahai community in the years from, say, the 1950s to the early 1990s, did not in themselves build a Bahai community life that could meet the needs of all of its new members. Of course, this was not new. It had been true in the years 1844 to 1944.

Both novitiates and veterans have often faced problems for which their experience provided few answers. When hoped for quantitative results did not materialize deep discouragement often set in and inactivity followed for many as night follows day. But slowly, through the 1980s and early 1990s a maturing Bahai experience, and especially with the guidance of the Universal House of Justice, the trustees of the global undertaking that had been initiated more than a century before by a charismatic Force that was arguably the greatest that history had ever experienced, led to the formation of this new paradigm.

STATISTICS

Some observers had the view that in the years from, say 1976 to 1996, the Bahai Faith did not grow. While this has been true in some of the countries of the world, it is not true in most. In the USA from 1976 to 1996 the Bahai population doubled from about 75,000 to 140,000(circa) and I could site similar stats for the Canada and Australia among other countries. From 1956 with some 250,000 believers, from about one million in 1976 to 1996 and, arguably, four million believers; from a religion with most of its members in Iran in the 1950s to a religion with its members scattered to the four corners of the world, this new global religion could be said to have experienced a paradigm change in these years as well, although the language of paradigms was not invoked. That the growth I have referred to was not in places where many westerners lived in the two decades from 1976 to 1996 was a cause of more than a little concern, was a test to the spiritual fibre of the Bahai membership in the West, those refined inheritors, those spiritual descendants of the Dawnbreakers, those believers who lived in the half-light as the Guardian called these years of the Formative Age.

The Bahá'í population of the contiguous forty-eight states was about 110,000 in 1992, but Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico together have about six thousand more. Reconstructing the membership figures for the American Bahá'ís decade by decade is complicated by changing definitions of membership and poor data collection, but the following numbers have been determined: From 1899 to 1921 the number of Bahais ranged between 1500 and 2500, depending on how many of the Bahai sympathizers one includes. In 1936 the membership had risen to 2584; in 1944, to 4800; in 1956, to 7000; in 1963, to 10,000; in 1969, 13,000; in 1971, 31,000; in 1974, 60,000; in 1979, 75,000; in 1987, 100,000. See: "The American Bahai Community in the Nineties," by Robert H. Stockman, Bahai Research Office, Wilmette, Ill. Published in Dr. Timothy Miller, ed., America's Alternative Religions, SUNY Press, Albany, 1995. In 2010 the numbers had arisen to 165,000. With some effort, indeed much effort and research, readers could find out the statistical development within the more than 200 countries wherein the Bahai Faith is now found. In the years of this new Bahai culture the BWC has developed a statistical section to deal with the many issues that now arise in relation to numbers.

Statistics, postal addresses and Bahai membership records are themselves a complex entity. Numbers and details, documents and dossiers, facts and figures, measurements and memoranda, reports and quantitative results as well as testimonies and stories, however important they are in the Bahai community, are not the essence of Bahá'í community life. The use of statistics in all fields is a discipline in itself and I do not want to get into the permutations and combinations of this discipline in relation to this paradigm. Statistics often exhibit a snowball effect: arbitrary figures become widely repeated, and soon become part of the conventional wisdom. In his book Damned Lies and Statistics Joel Best notes that a number "takes on a life of its own through repetition." Best continues: "the number comes to be treated as a straightforward fact -- accurate and authoritative."

It might seem unfair to criticize various sources for statistical errors in books and articles which are not primarily concerned with statistics. But it is precisely because these works are thoughtful and articulate that they serve as good examples. Numbers are unforgiving: small errors can become big errors; even faulty statistics are still imbued with authority by virtue of their source. How can we separate good statistics from the bad? The first step is to approach all numbers with some skepticism.

The statistics department at the Bahai World Centre housed now in The Seat on the 4th floor, as I say above, is dealing with some of these complex questions. Some additional comments to those made above on numbers and stats, though, are necessary and I will be brief. The Bahai Faith is, for the most part, highly diffuse rather than concentrated and this, among other major barriers to demographic research by outsiders, makes surveys and censuses, except of course government censuses which ask individuals their religion, simply unable to be conducted with any degree of comprehensiveness. This is especially true at the statistical levels required to accurately gauge the extent, dispersion and membership of many religious and other minorities in the world.

In some countries the Bahá'í Faith is illegal, making it difficult for even the Bahá'í community in these places to maintain an accurate count. The movement of Bahai refugees out of Iran in and after the 1970s significantly altered the demography of many Bahai communities in western countries. In Australia, where I have been living for four decades, there were some 17,000 Bahais by 2006, the end of the first decade of this new paradigm, on the lists of believers and about 10,000 of these are made up of Iranian born as well as first and second generation Australians with Iranian ancestry.

In Canada, where my Bahai life began, there are now some 30,000 Bahais more than sixty times the number there were when my mother saw an advertisement in the local newspaper in Ontario and then attended her first fireside in 1953. Iranian Bahá'ís make up a significant part of this national community as well. In the bigger global picture and according to an article which appeared at a Foreign Policy website in its May 2007 edition, the Bahai Faith had a growth rate of 1.70 percent and the number of its adherents was 7.7 million. This was reported from the World Christian Encyclopaedia. Their methodology is apparently statistically sophisticated and includes, as I understand, people who will identify themselves as Baha’i but who won’t necessarily have enrolled with the Baha’i communities. This is but one of the variable stats reported around the world.

Localities where Bahais resided on the planet went from 3,117 in the early 1950s, to 11,092 in the early 1960s, to 31,883 in the late 1960s, to 69,541 in 1973, to 102,704 in 1979, to 112,137 in 1988 and to 119,276 in 1994. For all practical purposes this article, this book, assumes a 120,000 locality base on the planet and 16,000 clusters, a new term within this paradigm. There were 1600 IPGs, intensive programs of growth, in January 2011. Until further notice, readers should not expect a discussion of the numbers of IPGs in the remaining years of the current FYP. The entire organizational structure of this new paradigm is one of the many factors now assisting the Bahai community in developing an accurate statistical base. Already in use in some cities around the world before the emergence of this new paradigm, the intimate level of the neighbourhood gradually occupied a more important position in Bahai administration as it would do, without doubt,in the decades ahead in the literally millions, if not billions, of neighbourhoods, depending of course on the multitude of possible definitions, of permutations and combinations of such collectivities on the planet. The instituting of the practice of what is essentially a decentralization of Bahai activity to the neighbourhood level has brought both advantages and new problems which I hope to discuss in a future edition of this book and as this process of decentralization advances under this new paradigm. Of course, in most places, most localities where Bahais reside, this decentralizing process has not begun, indeed, is not relevant, as yet and may not be for decades and possibly centuries to come, if ever. This new paradigm has many new features, features which had already emerged before this paradigm began in the 1990s, and other features which have yet to emerge within this new framework of organization, analysis and action.

The rapid increase in localities and numbers since I became associated with this Faith in the 1950s as I point out in this article, has produced its own problems associated with growth. Some areas paused for a time while attempts were made to deepen the knowledge and experience of the new Bahá'ís. Concern with quantities and numerical successes often limited concern for quality. This new paradigm is partly concerned with this reality, this problem of quantity and quality, the problem of boom and bust as it is sometimes called. The problem of numbers: too many or not enough will, it seems to me, be with us for some time to come, perhaps centuries as it has been a problem since the inception of this Faith in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1892, on the passing of Bahaullah, it has been estimated that there were 50,000 Bahais; in 1921, 115,000, in 1953 some 200,000 and in 1963 about 400,000.

The Bahai community has been making efforts for many years to obtain accurate statistical data. As the International Teaching Centre pointed out in April 2003 statistics have been an ever-present problem, a phenomenon that always needs to be addressed: “the task of refining the criteria needed for valid assessments of what the community is actually achieving.....is proving to be an ongoing challenge to institutions. The counterproductive nature of rigid criteria is obvious, but the necessity for a well-defined scheme to carry out evaluation is essential." In the last four years, 2007-11, a new scheme of statistical data-collection has been introduced and it is still a-work-in- progress. This whole paradigmatic shift in emphasis is a-work-in-progress, as people say somewhat colloquially these days. When I come to revise this commentary, as I hope to do in the months and years ahead, the content of this lengthy piece of writing will, I have little doubt, alter in extent, focus and content.

During the years of this paradigmatic shift thusfar, the Baha’i community in the West and much of the East is not being faced with the many problems that come from vast and significantly increased enrolments. Accelerated and sustained growth is now taking place in some two per cent(see below, Lample) of the 6000 clusters in which Bahais reside. Outside of this two per cent it would appear that enrolments are sporadic, a few new believers here and there. Significant increases have yet to be realized in most places including most A clusters, defined as those clusters with the largest number of Bahais. In many A-clusters the rate of enrolments has actually decreased in the first fifteen years of this new paradigm. Learning about growth has not resulted in a simple formula for action. Indeed, as the House of Justice emphasized in their Ridvan 2010 message among other messages: there are no simple formulae, no hard and fast rules. Rather, sacrifice and perseverence, critical thought, constant valuation and the revising of methods are required. Moving into the new and uncharted waters of this paradigm has often resulted in new obstacles.

The more than 1500 A-clusters with their IPGs, intensive programs of growth, by 2010, helped to turn the tide of concern for numbers. The Bahai community had two full years, from April 2010 to April 2012,to strengthen the pattern of expansion and consolidation established around the world in country after country. This turning of the tide, as one writer put it several years ago at the beginning of the Five Year Plan(2001-2006), saw a significant increase in numbers compared to the years, say, 1975 to 2000 in many parts of the world, but not everywhere. I hope to keep readers abrest of these statistics as best I can as the current Five Year Plan(2011-2016) develops in the next five years and the new one,(2016-2021) the sixth in the series with the explicit aim of advancing the process of entry by troops--unfolds. But, as I say elsewhere in this book, the game is not solely and especially about numbers or, in many places--if not most in the West--the Bahá'ís would have given up long ago.

Some observers would say that significant growth patterns are now being achieved in many localities on the planet, although not in many places in the West. One writer has noted that of the 16,000 clusters in 2006 "some 10,000 remained unopened and less than 2% were capable of taking on the challenge of growth."(Lample, p.104) As another reliable source for this writer has indicated: in 150 of the 200 territories in the world there is at least one IPG; in another 50 there are no IPGs. The picture of growth and statistical details is highly mixed, complex and is a work-in-progress as I refer to above. It has always been this way and it looks like it always will be for some years and decades to come--if not centuries! Much of the teaching work is unpredictable in its outcome; and much is predictable. So what is new! Sadly, much of one's teaching efforts are quite predictable, at least in terms of enrolments. For this reason the House of Justice has reiterated that the Bahai community should not measure their efforts in terms of enrolments.

This book dwells on statistics to a limited extent and I may pick up this theme in more detail in the years ahead as this book unfolds here at BLO. Wikipedia has an excellent discussion of statistics in terms of National Spiritual Assemblies. Readers with a fascination for statistics can read estimates at a range of internet sites. Statistics have long been used by individuals and groups to prove and illustrate, disprove and counter, claims of growth and decline, development and regress. for now I leave this often complex and elusive subject.

The achievements of the last 15 years have not come without difficulties; the successes are not realized universally but neither are the failures. There is no rigid formula or set of procedures for the teaching work as I have indicated above quoting the House of Justice in the process. There is no doubt that a breakthrough has occurred in the last 15 years from a global perspective. Lample puts it well: "the guidance we receive is not simply a list of suggestions from which individuals and institutions choose according to their own preferences. The question is not does the guidance apply but rather how does the guidance apply to me?

20000 LSAs----1600O CLUSTERS---120000 LOCALITIES----5 TO 7 MILLION MEMBERS

Although Baha’is have always been interested in numbers, an increase in numerical quantities, in the number of believers; although the Baha’i community has always given priority to the establishment of groups at the local level throughout the entire planet, paradigm shifts like this one do not mean, nor have they ever meant, that numbers will necessarily increase as day follows night with some in-built and natural inevitability anywhere and everywhere. Far from it. I see one of the many roles of this shift as yet another preparatory period, another phase, stage, as another paradigm shift in the long process of entry by troops, the prelude to an eventual mass conversion. Not all the individuals who come together in Bahai communities have chosen the path of servitude; indeed, they have each chosen different levels of servitude and sacrifice. Some come together in their respective communities for the sake of the Cause; some come together for the social, the companionship, the stimulation; some readily assume a posture of learning that is indispensable for collective endeavour within this new paradigm and some do not. A systematic process is set in motion in some ways more systematic with each Plan within the community. In this process the friends review their successes and difficulties, adjust and improve their methods accordingly, learn and move forward, sometimes hesitatingly, sometimes unhesitatingly. Sometimes the study of the Creative Word is systematic and sometiems it is not.

This all takes place within an immensely diverse field, with common patterns but also with the creative force of individual initiative and not everyone doing the same thing across 20,000 LSAs, 6,000 clusters and 120,000 localities where Bahais reside. The balance between the subordination of the individual to the group and the right of the individual to self-expression, to personal rights and freedom of initiative is often a difficult balance to achieve. The aim is not to lose individual in the mass and to allow the individual to find their own place in the flow of progress. This balance, it seems to me, is part of what this new paradigm aims to achieve as it develops its community focus and its focus on the primary development of the individual.(UHJ, Letter to the Bahais of the USA, 29/12/88).

Many national communities had a proven capacity to enlist thousands or even tens of thousands of new believers in a relatively short perod of time but consolidation was not possible. Other communities had a strong administration but had an inward focus and little growth. A change in the pattern of action around the Bahai world was essential and this new culture of learning and growth was that change. After 15 years of implementation there is clear evidence that a fresh capacity has been breathed into the Bahai world. An excellent overview of recent developments is provided in a new book by Paul Lample entitled "Revelation and Social Reality" and I will leave it to readers to follow-up on this overview. From 1996 when Bahai communities for the most part were small and inwardly directed to 2006 a new pattern of action had been expressed, crystallized, in the Bahai world. The problem of sustaining large-scale expansion that had stymied the Bahai world for almost four decades had finally found a resolution in less than ten years.

WHERE ARE THE LARGE NUMBERS?

Large numbers have not characterized growth patterns in the West in the Bahai community since at least the mid-1970s and in the places where I have lived in Canada and Australia since as far back as 1972. Large numbers certainly did enter this Faith in the late 1980s in many other parts of the world. From 1970 to 1990 the numbers grew globally from about one million to four million but, from time to time, the Universal House of Justice expressed its concern for the slowness of the growth, the statistical side of things. In the USA numbers have increased after the bubble of enrolments in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but discussions about enrolments in most places in western countries are not a source of excitement and encouragement. Since the late 1970s and the number of LSAs have actually dropped in Africa, Asia, South America or so it would appear from some statistical reports I have read on the internet. Something like a third of the Bahai comity in the USA has no known address. In Australia where I live, over 4000 members on the list of some 17,000 believers in 2010 have no known address, no contact point.

Many believers in western Bahá'í communities wondered what their attitude should be to the prolonged and sustained absence of growth for at least a quarter of a century, say, 1975-2000. The British Bahá'í community, for instance, remained static and even had slightly reduced numbers since the year 1975. I understand from anecdotal reports that many communities in Western Europe, France and Switzerland for example, share this pattern of low or negative growth. In the United States, according to Robert Stockman (bahai-library.com/essays/membership.stats.html), the Bahai community in the period 1979-1998 grew from 77,396 (48,357 confirmed addresses) to 138,168. Of these 138,000 however, roughly half are mail returns and address unknown. This has led Juan Cole to estimate a Bahai population in the USA of circa 60,000. Margit Warburg estimated that 10-20% of Bahá'ís were "inactive" in Denmark and anyone familiar with continental Europe could site chapter and verse on many a sad situation statistically for the last quarter of the twentieth century.

An entire generation of Bahá'ís, particularly those that entered the Faith in a period of high expansion in the 1950s, 1960's and 1970's and also their children, have experienced constant disappointment, frustration and powerlessness in the teaching work. This has coincided with a growing emphasis on entry by troops, expansion and a consequent development of high expectations. This resulted in a sense of apparent failure and discouragement in large sections of the community. The life-giving task of teaching the faith came to be associated with feelings of pain and inadequacy. In 2002 the department of the secretariat wrote on behalf of the Universal House of Justice that the lack of significant numerical growth in Bahá'í communities in Western lands, while more precisely applicable to some countries than others, is largely accurate and the resulting distress many Bahais feel was fully justified. To see important Bahá'í communities markedly lacking in the development of the human resources required to reach populations desperately searching for solutions to the crisis in which society is sinking is painful indeed to believers aware of the potency of Bahá'u'lláh's Message.

This consideration, that letter went on to say, was an important element in the drafting of the relevant sections of the document "Century of Light", to which it made reference. Several passages of that document attempted to acquaint believers everywhere with the profound change in Bahá'í culture that the preceding decades of struggle, achievement and disappointment made possible and that was capitalized on through the agency of the Four Year Plan(1996-2000). The culture now emerging is one in which groups of Bahá'u'lláh's followers explore together the truths in His Teachings, freely open their study circles, devotional gatherings and children's classes to their friends and neighbours, and invest their efforts confidently in plans of action designed at the level of the cluster, that makes growth a manageable goal. The enthusiasm with which Bahá'í communities in most parts of the world are responding to this challenge, and the results their efforts are beginning to garner have been a source of great joy to the House of Justice. The number of children in most parts of the world who have benefitted from organized classes of instruction from grade to grade in acquiring knowledge of the Cause, its history and teachings, has been few, but this has begun to change in the first 15 years of this new paradigm. The beginnings are promising but there is much work to be done and, inevitably, more work as expansion procedes in the years ahead.

All is not bright and rosy. The NSA of the USA at the end of the first year(April 2007) of the current Five Year Plan(2006-2011)wrote the following in its assessment of the Bahá'í community’s spiritual vitality and prospects for growth. That institution said it was inspired and confident due to the elements required for a concerted "robust and capable" efforts to infuse the USA with the spirit of Bahá'u'lláh’s Revelation. Public awareness and receptivity to the Bahá'í Faith, that NSA pointed out, was high. Tens of thousands of Bahá'ís had been trained in the core activities; well over 1,100 children’s classes had been held regularly; 41 programs of intensive growth were in operation and Local Spiritual Assemblies and cluster agencies evinced increasing vigor in their pursuit of the Plan’s goals. This pattern is true in country after country around the world insofar as the core activities are concerned. I could quote from later NSA reports in the USA and other countries but this book would assume dimensions that are too extensive. The picture from country to country is highly diverse and I find it difficult to generalize across the immense world that is this new Bahai world.

Generally there is an increase in the numbers in all core activities nationally in most western nations. Nevertheless, as the NSA of the USA reported in 2006, growth still remains low. In the past 16 years, 1996 to 2012, in the first decade and a half of this new culture of learning and growth, there has actually been decline in enrollments in many countries. The picture looked much brighter in the USA in 2008 and 2009 and each country in the Bahai world has its own story as the new paradigm is being put in place around the Bahai world in these first two decades: 1996-2016. I will try and summarize and generalize, bring this book up to date, in the months and years ahead as this book is revised and reworked as more and more information comes in, as the the Bahai world puts into action the plans and programs developed at all levels of Bahai administration, as the capacity building of individuals continues especially in the areas of inner life and private character and as the agonies of humanity deepen as they inevitably will.

But this book will not become a statistical report. Believers can get this from a number of sites on the internet and it is not my purpose in this book to provide a statistical base for Bahai developments in the 190 countries and 46 territories of the world to which this new Cause has spread and where excerpts of Baha’u’llah’s writings have now been translated into 802 languages.(The Bahá’í World 2003, p.311). So many of the processes in this paradigm are long-term ones and this applies especially to capacity building. Indeed, like learning, it is a life-long activity. So many of the processes involve a rich tapestry of community life in the greatest drama of all--the drama which is our lives, our lives in society and in our private domain.

GOALS IN BITE-SIZED CHUNKS

It can not be overemphasised how important it is to set reasonable goals and take small steps in order to turn bite-sized changes into lasting change over the long term. This process is sometimes called the Swiss-cheese method. As groups sit at the table of their cluster and other institutional meetings, as they come together in their several ways: study circles, Feasts, deepenings, LSAs and NSAs, as well as in the many forums at the Bahai World Centre: sometimes with all of the stakeholders, sometimes with only a few, present--they are often reminded that there is no singular solution. The whole thing is a vast tapestry or jig-saw puzzle and it is the individual in the end who has to put it together in his personal and community life. He or she has to put this paradigmatic shift into his or her own life. For this reason I have focussed, perhaps too much for some readers, on a quite personal perspective in this extended essay here at BLO. I have focussed on what I have done, what I want to do and where I hope to go in my service to the Cause within the framework of this paradigm and its action-oriented programs and I invite readers to work out their own role, their own goals, aims and objectives. As readers go about this process they might like to keep the Guardian’s words at the forefront of their minds: “our past is not the thing that matters so much in this world as what we intend to do with our future.” Feelings of guilt can be crippling; they can also be protective; they also can help us find the balance.

This new process, this paradigm change, was initiated in 1996 and perhaps even earlier. For at least a dozen or more years(1996-2010)it has been aimed at capacity building, at a culture of learning and of growth in the size of the community as well as an accompanying paradigm shift in the Bahá’í community life. This process has begun to result in the flowing into the waters of the Baha’i community a sometimes strange, often new, sense of activity, of systematic study of the Creative Word, of learning and teaching, of the extension of individual teaching endeavours, “irrespective of circumstance,” to a wider circle of people. Obviously, this does not mean that in every town and city, village and hamlet of the 120,000 localities where Bahais live that there has been or will be in the years thusfar and immediately ahead an increase in the number of Baha’is, however desirable such an increase may be. Statistics, as one analyst put it in gloomy terms, are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death. While I would not want to hit statistics that hard, for they are a key ingredient in the success of science and consequently a crucial basis for our technological and material culture, they are not the last and only word in the social world.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ACTIVITIES

The introduction of many more social and economic projects, especially since the 1960s, has broadened the range of activities in many of the 120,000 Bahá'í localities and communities around the world. Although this book does not deal with the vast development in the social and economic spheres during the three decades before this new paradigm(1966-1996) as well as the last decade or so during the new culture of learning, a few words are in order. Most Bahá'í social and economic development efforts have been and are now fairly simple activities of fixed duration in which Bahá'ís in villages and towns, cities and rural areas, around the world apply spiritual principles to the problems and challenges faced by their localities. These activities either originate in the Bahá'í communities themselves or are a response to the invitation of other organizations. It is estimated that in 1996-97, at the outset of this new paradigm, there were some 1,450 endeavours of this kind, including tree-planting and clean-up projects, health camps, workshops and seminars on such themes as race unity and the advancement of women, and short-term training courses.

The second category of Bahá'í social and economic development consists of approximately 225 ongoing projects. The vast majority are academic schools, while others focus on areas such as literacy, basic health care, immunization, substance abuse, child care, agriculture, the environment, or microenterprise. Some of these projects are administered by nascent development organizations which have the potential to grow in complexity and in their range of influence. All projects seek to apply or explore particular Bahá'í principles.

Certain Bahá'í development efforts have achieved the stature of development organizations with relatively complex programmatic structures and significant spheres of influence. They systematically train human resources and manage a number of lines of action to address problems of local communities and regions in a coordinated, interdisciplinary manner. Also included in this category are several institutions--especially large schools--which, although focusing only on one field, have the potential to make a significant impact in contributing to the welfare of the communities in which they operate. In this category there are currently 31 such organizations, which are located in all continents of the globe.

Holly Hansen looked at the evolution of Bahá'í involvement in social and economic development and highlighted some current projects in her article which appeared in the 1992-93 edition of The Bahá'í World( pp. 229-245). But these developments, partly within the Office of Economic and Social Development at the Bahai World Centre, partly within the Bahai International Community an NGO of the United Nations with offices in Geneva and New York and partly at other levels of Bahai administration are not the focus of this new paradigm. Indeed there is much about the Bahai Faith that is not the concern of this article, this book and readers with a wider interest are advised to consult other sources to further their specific interests, interests largely unrelated to the focus in this paradigm analysis.

I would like to close this section, though, with some comments from a talk given at a Bahai conference on social and economic development at Orlando Florida in 2000 by Ludwig Tuman. Tuman said that ever since the Bahá’í community began to involve itself worldwide in the area of social and economic development the House of Justice has reminded the Bahai community repeatedly "that society’s material development will be solid and lasting only if it is built on the foundation of a spiritual understanding of life." The Universal House of Justice put it succinctly when it stated: “..The working of the material world is merely a reflection of spiritual conditions and until the spiritual conditions can be changed there can be no lasting change for the better in material affairs.” We’ve seen that the highest aspiration of art is precisely to help uplift humanity’s spiritual condition. This means that the practice of art, along with models of learning such as the Ruhi Institute, should be regarded as one of those essential activities that can help to spiritualize both the Bahá’í community and society as a whole. Art, then, clearly belongs among the primary activities that help lay the very foundation for Bahá’í social and economic development.

PARADIGM PARALYSIS: THE OLD AND THE NEW PARADIGM

This new paradigm has now gained its own new followers. An intellectual battle has taken place and is still being waged, although it seems to me with far less intensity after more than a decade of varying degrees of dissension, between the followers of the new paradigm and the hold-outs of the old paradigm. Perhaps the greatest barrier to a paradigm shift, in some cases, is the reality of paradigm paralysis: the inability or refusal to see beyond the current models of thinking, to think outside the old box. In some ways, though, the whole notion of an old and new paradigm is a false dichotomy since there are elements in both paradigms that are the same or similar. At the centre of both, for example, is that God's voice is now heard in a new message that came down from heaven, a new revelation, an additional heavenly message. I am still, as a Bahai, the exotic outsider I was under the old paradigm. At best I and my religion are an interesting subject for debate but not a vital force in life for my society, at least this is true in all the places I have lived and where I now live. Reason and the senses, long ago replacing revelation, are still enthroned everywhere I live and move and have my being.

The great intellectual movements of the last hundred years are all devoid of religious faith with a demythologised and secularized eschatology. The battle under the new paradigm remains largely the same. The individual Bahai must deal with secularism, nationalism, tribalism, nihilism, hedonism, the permissive society, escapism, meaninglessness, normlessness, the pluralism, the multiplicity, of non-obligatory values, values torn loose from metaphysical moorings, inter alia. I could go on and on here and I invite readers to examine Schaefer's The Imperishable Dominion for a more detailed examination of the themes I have listed here. If lightening and thunder need time and the light of the stars need time, if deeds need time even after they are done to be seen and heard, if two great wars and the blood, sweat and tears of several generations are slowly producing what is latent in this cycle, my guess is that it will slowly appear during this new paradigm around the strange, the queer, the flowery, the typically oriental and unsuitable for the West, language of Bahaullah amidst the poverty of emotive language that exists in our secular and often arid literary culture.

Much of the spirit of nationality and tribalism is like a sour ferment. The new wine of internationalism requires new bottles and they are slowly emerging in our time. The practical politics of our time has come to be needed in ecumenical, humanitarian and global forms. The sense now of being part of a larger whole is one that underpins this new Bahai paradigm. The field of analysis for this new paradigm is at once local, cluster, regional, national, continental, intercontinental and planetary. No local analysis, no local understanding, becomes intelligible until it is viewed under the perspective of internationalism and its institutions, until we first focus on the whole. Our society is the whole of humankind; any one group is but a subdivision of a single group--the human family. This is the ethos which operates behind and under the new paradigm. It operated before this new paradigm, but it operates a fortiori in the last 15 years and in the decades to come for the very survival of the species.

TIME TAKES ITS COURSE

Sometimes the convincing force of the new paradigm is just time itself and the human toll it takes, Kuhn said, using a quote from Max Planck: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." Kuhn vehemently states that when a scientific paradigm is replaced by a new one, albeit through a complex social process, the new one is always better, not just different. It seems to me that this is clearly the case with this new Bahai paradigm. Kuhn argues that the language and theories of different paradigms cannot be translated into one another or rationally evaluated against one another. They are incommensurable. I like this and I like the relevance this idea has when applied to the Bahai paradigm.

In the latter part of the 1990s, 'paradigm shift' emerged as a buzzword, was popularized in marketing-speak and appeared more frequently in print and publication. In his book, Mind The Gaffe, author Larry Trask advised readers to refrain from using it and to use caution when reading anything that contained the phrase. The term is referred to in several articles and books as abused and overused to the point of becoming meaningless. The term "paradigm shift" has found uses in other contexts, representing the notion of a major change in a certain thought-pattern: a radical change in personal beliefs, complex systems or organizations, replacing former ways of thinking or organizing with radically different ways of thinking or organizing at the operational levels. Sometimes the pejorative terms groupthink and mindset are found in the literature, literature that is critical of the vocabulary of paradigms. I will say more on this later.

This new culture of learning and growth is now in the middle of its second decade. Each of us must work out where we fit into this new paradigm. In the end, we all must see where each of us fits into this new picture however extensive the analysis, however complex the process often appears and however enthusiastic or critical of the process we may be as we live through it in our individual and community lives. My "fit" is just one of millions of others and I leave it to others to describe their own "fits." I would like to think that in this commentary, this book, on the new culture of learning which follows I can give voice to insights at the heart of the recent changes in the experience of the Bahai community. I would like to think that I can enlarge and awaken my own mind and the minds of others as well as articulate spiritual verities through wilful daily action and my own wilful and engaged rational faculty. I have been trying to do this as a classroom teacher and lecturer for the last several decades. From 1967 to 2005 I certainly tried as a teacher of pre-primary, primary, secondary and post-secondary students as well as of senior citizens. I had tried before this as a student in my Bahai junior youth, adolescent and young adult days, say, 1957 to 1967. And so, I feel I bring to this overall written exercise half a century of trying. As one noted humorist once said, though, in a joking fashion: "I feel a little like the marriage guidance counsellor who has been married ten times. He has never pulled off a successful marriage, but he has had much experience trying."

MY OWN EXPERIENCE OF WRITING AND MY MEMOIR

I have addressed this change of culture at the start of Part 2 of my memoir, a memoir I have placed here at BLO and which readers can download free of charge. It is a memoir I have been writing during the first two decades of this paradigm change. My life was affected by this paradigm change and it seemed relevant, at least to me, to discuss these paradigm changes in relation to my ongoing life. After discussing the affect of this paradigm change on my own life in my memoir, I then continued with my memoir, in that Part 2, in the wider context of my life. This change of culture was something, as I say, that I experienced and it is to this subject that I turned to in my autobiography or memoir. Readers interested in this wider context and my memoir are invited to download it here at BLO in all its 1800 to 2500 pages.

I go about analysing this new paradigm and attempting to fit the several paradigm shifts in the Bahai experience since 1944, to shifts in my own life, as I have indicated above, as well as to shifts in the life of my society. The exercise of examining these more personal and society-wide shifts is one that I take on in my memoirs(see BLO "Pioneering Over Four Epochs"--Parts 1, 2 and 3), not in any systematic way, but periodically and when it seemed relevant. I would have to write a separate book on the shifts in the world in the last 15 years since the onset of this paradigm shift or, for that matter, in the previous paradigm shifts in the several decades from the 1930s to the 1990s when previous paradigms were--arguably--in place. If I were to engage in a minute examination of the shifts in my public and private life here in this discussion of the Bahai paradigms this already lengthy work would become out of reach of readers due to its sheer size. I settle, then, in my memoirs for a brief examination of my whole life in terms of the paradigm shifts that have taken place in the Bahai community, but this is not my aim here in this book.

My aim in this essay, article or book is, rather, to focus on the recent change in culture that has come centre-stage in the last two decades in the international Bahai community. The way we see, it is often said, defines the objects we observe just as the way we live actively shapes our thoughts on life. This aphorism is a useful one within which to view this paradigm shift. To look at this thing, this new paradigm, is very different from seeing it. One does not see anything until one sees its order and beauty, its value and purpose, its meaning and truth. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. I have Oscar Wilde to thank for that idea and, like many of his ideas, it provides provocative food for thought. Wilde is begging us to rediscover the artist in ourselves, to be more imaginative and more creative and in doing so to create a more effective and efficient community life. This new paradigm certainly challenges the Bahai community to a new order of participation.

We hardly begin to learn anything about the nature of life for the individual or the community until we succeed in distinguishing the points of relative discontinuity in the ever-rolling stream: the bends, the straight stretches, the crests and troughs of the waves and even the myriad forms that arise when the waters are frozen into a glacier. The very concept of continuity is only significant as a symbolic mental background on which we can plot our perceptions of discontinuity in all their variety and complexity. This new paradigm provides a crucial discontinuity in which the Bahai community can view the continuities and discontinuities of the last 250 years of its history going back to the life of Shaykh Ahmad as he "arose with unerring vision" to prepare the way for the Bab.(Nabil, p.1) This history can become, in the process, not a burden on the memory, but an illumination of the soul and a story that can contribute to the common fortunes of humankind.

I do not regard myself as a scout who is helping to guide the Bahai expedition on a journey into unexplored territory. But I am someone who is participating actively in the journey with 1000s, indeed, millions of my fellow believers with my little knowledge, skills and experience. Each of our contributions, a thimble-full or a gallon-measure, we make as best we can always acknowledging that we could have done better for our perfection is inevitably and always elusive. Hopefully I can: (a) discuss intelligently various aspects of the Bahai community struggle and help that community to make progress, (b) draw constructive perspectives from the past to inform the present and future;(c) provide insight and some degree of technical knowhow or capacity for an ongoing study of the Bahai text;(d) have a role in problem posing and problem solving; and(e) help the defining of culture and intercultural relations. On this journey I do not have any authority; while making some hopefully meaningful contribution, like any other participant, my views are fallible; I am just one of the many are called. Whether I am one of the few that are chosen will remain to be seen until after my parting from this mortal coil. This hardly needs to be said.

I found as I wrote my memoir, the wider context for this study of the paradigm shift in the Bahai community, a quiet emotion of curiosity blended with a certain intensity and superfluity within me all of which led to my essaying many aspects of life at once: myself, my society and my community. The result is, what you might call my style, my way of seeing this interrelated triangle of subject matter. In some ways the process is a perceptual experience put into words, an attempt to interpret a large field of reality, to unify factual knowledge and belief and to transform my experience into attitude and further action. My creativity, guided by purpose, alters my perception as I go along; it also changes how I feel about the subject I am writing. This analysis is not some literary ornamentation or a matter of choice of vocabulary or an amusing linguistic set of tics or wordy mannerisms. As I see it, this book provides a rhythmic alteration between two activities--the collection of materials and their arrangement, the finding of facts and their interpretation. In order not to be beleaguered by the mass of facts and ideas, issues and contexts which now exist in this new paradigm I have to sort them out and arrange them into some kind of order of meanign to me---and hopefully to others. This will help me to continue my study of this paradigm in the years to come: for this new Bahai culture has just begun!

The role of this analysis is to throw light not only on my personal story, my memoir, but also on this new paradigm, some old paradigms and to provide a means for the: (i) engagement of my life in a process of actualizing my potential, (ii) gaining more control over my life and (iii) facilitation of my own learning competence. I also aim to provide these means for others, for readers who come to these thread of thought, this long post, this article, essay or book. This new paradigm has many roles and this commentary discusses some of them. It attempts to give them a fuller context and a wider direction than is often found in discussions in other places. Such, anyway, are some of the aims and the roles I like to see this exposition possessing and addressing. Fresh facts must be found as the years go on so that the process of synthesis and interpretation can be carried further. No collection of facts is ever complete because the new paradigm is without bounds and the arrangement of the facts and ideas is always provisional.

A PARADIGMATIC CONTEXT:

GENERAL COMMENTS ON BAHAI HISTORY AND TEACHING THE FAITH

The solution to the everpresent teaching question in the more than two centuries of Babi-Bahai history going back to Shaykh Ahmad's teaching role in the fin de siecle years of the eighteenth century is different for each generation, each epoch of Bahai history. That the solution is a complex one at some level, at many levels, should not be a matter of surprise given the part played in the process by imperfect men and women, people with one foot in the past and its patterns, one foot in the future and faced squarely with the ever-present on a day to day basis. It is a future where dreams, aspirations and plans lie in wait to stimulate the vision and on which to take action. When the visions in question seem the most utopian of any group on the planet, at least as some of its critics argue; when the plans and aspirations so often seem to exceed their realistic achievement, at least in the short term, frustration often sets in. And so the House of Justice emphasizes that: "Those of us who are alive to the vision of the Faith, are particularly privileged to be consciously engaged in efforts intended to stimulate and eventually enhance" the achievement of that vision, its pre-eminent purpose & its grand design all inherent in this new Revelation. The vision must be alive for it is vision that creates reality but we also must be practical realists to keep the dogs of discouragement from eating away at our very souls.

THE FIRST GENERATION OF BAHAI CULTURE

From the 1860s to the 1880s, the first three decades of Bahai historical experience, the new culture, the new paradigm, if you like, of learning and growth for the first generation of Bahais, typically criticized the clerical establishment and formulated an alternative, spiritualized and disestablished view of its place in society, legitimizing the sovereignty of secular rulers independently of clerical authority. The Baha’i teachings gave nineteenth-century Persians who wished to do so a vehicle to resist the cultural and hence social and political hegemony not only of the ’ulama, but of the intruding Western world. The Baha’i teachings could appropriate the idiom not just of Persianate Islam, but also of the West and use it to resist Islamic and Persian cultural hegemony, in the same way as Islam gave the Sassanids a means to appropriate the cultural idiom of the Arabs to resist their attempt at cultural dominance. In other words, the Baha’i teachings opened an avenue for a new, post-Islamic identity that promised to overcome and finally resolve the cultural and, by implication, political and social, tensions of the day. These teachings of Bahaullah also posed an unmistakable challenge to the existing order. What was seen by some as the fulfilment of Islam, was regarded by others as its open subversion. This was, if nothing else, a new paradigm for the Iranian Bahais of that generation, perhaps the greatest of all the paradigm shifts in the Bahai community in its 165 year history. Of course, Baha’u’llah’s message that the world should be unified would probably not have fallen on fertile soil much before the 1870s, because the impact of globalisation was not yet begun to be felt among potential proselytes. In the late nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth century, the climate for this idea was more receptive.

I would like to make one more general observation here regarding these earliest decades of Bahai experience and I thank the blog writer at Bahai Epistolary for this observation. The theological transition from Islam to Bahai theology has recently been mapped by Chris Buck. Buck described Baha’u’llah’s doctrinal teachings as “an ideological bridge to a new worldview.”( See: Chris Buck, Symbol and Secret (Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1995), chapter 5) This new worldview implied sociological innovations too. Traditionally, the energies released by large-scale Islamicate responses to a messianic claim have sought outlet in military enterprises. Such indeed was the case with Babism. The idea of the conquering Mahdi or Qaim pervaded prophetic expectations, and the conquest was expected to occur by military and supernatural means. This Islamic ideal of messianic conquest, like so much else in the Islamic heritage, was not rejected by Baha’u’llah, but it was recast in spiritualized form, community building, and moral regeneration taking the place of physical combat as the proper instruments of victory. Baha’u’llah would eventually conquer the world, but would do so by spiritual means, through the attraction of hearts, and the battle would be waged by Baha’is through a consecrated dedication to community building and the cultivation of moral rectitude. Not surprisingly, a doctrinal outlook that appropriated the prophetic expectations of all religions yet upheld the relativity of truth led to early experiments in multiculturalism. On the one hand were the imperatives from Baha’u’llah to consort with the followers of all religions; on the other was the conversion of non-Muslim minorities, which initiated a slow and gradual process of cultural rapprochement between converts from these various backgrounds, as has been broadly examined by Stiles-Maneck.(“The Conversion of Religious Minorities,” Journal of Baha’i Studies 3. 3 (1991)) One could analyse this paradigm shift for this first generation of Bahais in much more detail but the above will suffice.

THE NEXT GENERATION: 1890 TO 1920

If one was a Bahai in Iran in the next generation, say, the years from 1890 to 1920 a paradigmatic shift was also taking place. What did contemporary Persians of that generation themselves regard as innovative about Baha’u’llah’s teachings? One testimony comes from a Baha’i convert from the later period of Baha’u’llah’s ministry, a former cleric, writing in 1911 when the Baha’i community had been securely established in the East and had just begun to penetrate the West. The features he highlights as the most significant innovations of Baha’u’llah include: abstaining from crediting verbal traditions; prohibiting individual claims to authoritative interpretation; abrogating conflict and controversy on the basis of differences of opinion; the prohibition of slavery; the obligation to engage in allowable professions as a means of support, and obedience to this law being accepted as an act of worship; the compulsory education of children of both sexes; the command prohibiting cursing and execration and making it obligatory upon all to abstain from uttering that which may offend men; the prohibition on the carrying of arms except in time of necessity; the creation of the House of Justice and institution of national parliaments and constitutional governments; the exhortation to observe sanitary measures and cleanliness, and to shun utterly all that tends to filth and uncleanness; and the provisions of inheritance laws designed, in his view, to prevent the creation of monopolies.[Mirza Abu’l-Fadl Gulpaygani, Letters and Essays, 1886-1913, trans. Juan R. I. Cole (Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1992)]

As I have already mention above, a recently published memoir by Dr. Youness Afroukhteh(George Ronald, 2003)of his nine years in Akka from 1900 to 1909 outlined three types of covenant-breakers: (i) openly offensive people, (ii) those who were entirely severed from the Cause and played no part in its activities and (iii) trouble-makers, evil-doers, spies and informers. Each of the Central Figures of this Cause, Shoghi Effendi and the House of Justice have all had to deal with divisive forces. The remarkable thing is that this Faith has remained a religion that is still unified after nearly two centuries of its history. Those who have broken the Covenant and, in various ways, been harbingers of conflict and contention, or bred opposition and its dreadful schizmatic consequences have no place in this Cause. Bahaullah has protected this Faith against the baneful effects of the misuse of criticism; indeed, "dissidence is a moral and intellectual contradictions of the main objective animating the Bahai community."(UHJ, Letter to Bahais of USA, 29/12/88) But we must be constantly on our guard lest destructive forces enter our midst. The building of community, playing the role of custodians of unific forces will keep us all busy in the years ahead within this new paradigm as the Faith goes from strength to strength. After fifty years of participation in Bahai community life, I have found that the fine details of the story are only of interest to a relatively small circle of the Bahais and only a small handful of those outside this new Faith, those with some ax-to-grind. This reaction to a very complex history, of course, will change as this Cause comes under attack in the decades ahead within this new paradigm.

THE YEARS 1790 TO 2010

The years of this Faith's chief precursors, the years in the lives of the Central Figures of this Faith and, indeed, the years since the inception of the institutionalization of the original charismatic Force, the years, say, 1892 or 1921 to now, are, if nothing else, titanic, tragic as well as triumphant--and worthy of the term paradigm shift if one wanted to press a point. The achievements of the last two centuries are gigantic and stupendous but only barely, partly understood. We stand too close to the achievements, the vast changes, of these last 22 decades(1790 to 2010) to really appreciate them. Like a great symphony written by a famous composer and being played by a talented orchestra, the music, its beauty and meaning is simply not heard by most of the potential audience--as yet. Given the currents of skepticism, the blank walls of indifference and the immense complexity of these epochs in our fast emerging--if not already emerged--global society, many of the members of this discouragingly meagre audience within the Bahai community which has to grapple with this new paradigm are often only naturally befuddled and even bemused by much of its content. The Faith in its entirety, in addition to the paradigm itself-is a tour de force, a magnum opus, an epic, a cosmology, a metanarrative, a massive framework for a mythopoetic, metaphorical interpretation of reality, a universe, that far exceeds the individual's capacity to comprehend it.

A wise man or woman must forget the inevitable calamities that come along the path of human life, must alter their internal mental set, if he or she is to participate in and in time achieve the goals that are often set by Bahai institutions, by small groups or even by their own dear selves. This, of course, is easier said than done. I have found it this way for half a century now since the earliest days of my Bahai life as far back as the 1950s. There are always goals set in the Bahai community for each and all of us. In a world of chronic and passionate dissension, of strong opinionatedness, an extreme individualism and a cancerous materialism, it is and has been predictable that new paradigms in the Bahai community are met with enthusiastic espousal on the one hand and more cautious and even indifferent attitudes on the other. The nature of our society at least for millions of us in the West is that it offers us an ample leisure, idle amusements and many unprofitable studies and activities. Often some combination of gardening, shopping, sport, an engagement in some fancy hobby apparatus and an endless series of activities involving job, family and a very small circle of friends is wrapped around our psyches like a vice. We are hardly tempted, votaries of this or any Cause, to venture forth from the comfort of this personal and private domain and it is this factor alone that has held back the prosecution of plans for many a long year. This social reality is complex, difficult to penetrate and describe and this book cannot possibly explore the many patterns of social withdrawal that result from it. This factor without doubt militates against a more rapid spread of the Cause in this or any paradigmatic shift, but it also has the value of maintaining a type of business-as-usual modus operandi/modus vivendi so that the Cause can continue to grow along the edges of society in much the same way as Christianity did 2000 years ago.

EARLY CHRISTIANITY: THE ROMANS AND IRAN IN OUR TIME

Only the occasional ripple occurred in the Roman Empire in the first centuries of Christianity as the religion of Jesus had to deal with Roman persecutions. In our time only the occasional ripple has occurred from the persecution of the Bahais in Iran, a ripple which has disturbed the surface of the international Bahai community, but this disturbance has resulted in headlines again and again. The experience of the Iranian Bahai community in dealing with massive and periodic persecutions has become a continuing thread throughout several of the several community paradigm shifts in Babi-Bahai experience as far back as 1844. Outside the frequent polemics from various political and religious bodies in Iran, polemics that formed part of this periodic oppression and that resulted in frequent media publicity, the Bahá'í community was relatively speaking non-existent in the west before the early 1980s. If one were to judge by the utter absence from the written discourse of their fellow countrymen until, it seems, just the other day: intellectuals, activists, artists, journalists, both inside Iran and abroad, Iranian Bahá'ís certainly "exist" now in the voices and the minds of their compatriots, as never in this Faith's 165 year history. It is almost a truism for Bahá'ís, borne out not only scripturally, but by the long experience of repression, yet one that cannot ever lose its pathos, that each wave of persecution, each effort to erase this Faith's existence, is unfailingly accompanied by an unprecedented victory, that only digs its roots deeper and establishes the claims of this new Faith before the sight of men.

The latest chapter of extreme and nation-wide oppression, from the 1980's to the 2000's has achieved, globally speaking, the Bahá'í Faith's emergence from obscurity. This oppression has endowed the Bahá'ís with an extraordinary capacity for global concerted action, that countless activist organizations admire and respect, as Bahá'ís across the world for the first time arose as one voice in creative and united ways to seek redress and protection for their fellow believers, mobilising public opinion from city councils and local press to the European Parliament and the United Nations, and averted genocide. This important feature of Bahai experience in the last three decades can not be separated from the new paradigm of learning and growth; indeed, this oppression does now what it has always done back to the 1840s, it fertilizes the seed of growth; the oil is ignited and the resulting light spreads around the world even more than it already has as the second most widespread religion on the planet. Our role is to spread the light as far and wide as we are able. With Edith Wharton we can "be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

As one Bahai writer put it only last year, in 2009, the most immediate victory that the present episode of persecution has already achieved in a manner that has astounded observers, foremost among them the Bahá'ís themselves, is the final integration of the Iranian Bahá'ís into the broader identity of their nation. For the first time in their history, the Bahá'ís are not the other, the outsider, the heretical apostates to be shunned, persecuted and violated in so many ways. The Bahais have become, for a new and significant wave of non-Bahá'í Iranians, the prominent and the obscure alike, elite and ordinary people, from all walks of life, "one of us", fellow citizens, and the silence of the past is not only finally and irretrievably broken, but explicitly repudiated, and for all time. This experience of the Bahai Faith in the land of its birth is at the core of the Iranian culture of learning and growth, the new paradigm as it is expressed within Iran. The repercussions have spread around the world and provide a context for this new culture of growth that has, as yet, hardly been appreciated, at least from my point of view. I encourage readers to go to the blog entitled "Bahai epistolary" for an expansion of this theme. Of course, this is not true in every hamlet, town and every neighbourhood of every city. the persecution and oppression is not over. The 167 year story for the Bahais of Iran is, indeed, far from over. And the beginning of the beginning of this Cause in the West is also far from over. One could say that this Faith has just stuck its head above the ground but, unlike the proverbial groundhog, it will not be going back into the burrow.

I would like to make some comments on the paradigmatic change in how the Bahais of Iran have been viewed in the last century. Seven decades ago, when the Baha’is of Iran were first accused of espionage, they responded with astonishment. Until then, they had constantly been accused of corruption, blasphemy, and atheism but not of being Russian or English spies. During the course of the Iranian constitutional revolution and its aftermath, however, Iranian society had become increasingly skeptical of the negative role played by foreign powers, and had decided that its problems were rooted, not in atheism, but in imperialism. This gave rise to new, often grossly illogical, conspiracy theories, many of which implicated Baha’is. Thus, the old enemies were redefined to suit the new understanding. It took some time before Baha’is came to realize that anti-Baha’ism has indeed gone through a paradigm shift and was now defining its self-confessed enemy, the Baha’i Faith, as a foreign conspiracy against Iran and Islam.

In the last 30 years there has been a gradual corrosion of this whole paradigm, and the emergence of a common sense of identification, a move towards a reality-oriented understanding of history. Today, most Iranian intellectuals, as well as many well-educated middleclass individuals, are no longer willing to succumb to extravagant conspiracy theories. For anti-Baha’i propagandists, this implies that the old spy stories will no longer be effective. Thus, in practice, we are gradually shifting towards a new paradigm. Some critics in Iran are now using terms such as “New Babists” to refer to the members of opposition factions. They are also actively drawing parallels and exploring the possible links between their worldview and those of the Babi-Baha’i religions. I don't want to go into detail here for the picture is complex, but new paradigms are replacing old ones in the views of the Bahais in Iran by the non-Bahai majority.

CULTURAL DIFFERENCES

Cultural differences have always created misunderstandings and they will continue to do so in the years ahead within this new paradigm, whether the discussion is centred in the experience of Iranian Bahais or the experience of Bahais elsewhere. Perhaps this will be even more true with the many more new believers that will be part of the Bahai community in the decades ahead. Subtle and not so subtle cultural differences often create dislikes and even contempt among people of dissimilar backgrounds. We all have backgrounds filled with minute details which make our experience, our culture, unique. There are so many examples: punctuality, cleanliness, eating all the food on ones plate, respect for sacred objects, the need to be together at gatherings or the need to have space and be alone, variations in the sense of humour, admitting that one does not know something and pretending one knows when one does not, interrupting people when they are talking, domineering personalities, timidity and on and on. This new paradigm does not assume that suddenly all of the differences, cultural, social and personality, which cause irritation and hurt feelings are going to disappear and everyone is going to exhibit qualities of endless patience, compassion, tolerance, acceptance, consideration and understanding inter alia. The struggles in community life will continue as they have in the past right back to 1844 and, indeed, as far back as the years when Shaykh Ahmad left his homeland in northeast Arabia in the last decades of the 18th century. In some basic ways these cultural struggles and discontinuities are part and parcel, part of the very nature of our social and community existence, certainly in the epochs we are living through with their immense cultural, social, economic, psychological and sociological shifts in society, with people being thrown together who for centuries, perhaps forever in history, would never have met and certainly would not have eaten together and discussed life, society and its problems.

THIS GREAT TURNING POINT IN HISTORY

An understanding of the nature and meaning of the great turning point we are passing through at this climacteric of history as well as an appreciation of the implications of what has occurred since the coming of the Báb and Baha’u’llah, what is occurring in our lifetimes and what will occur in these early decades of this new millennium, as the House of Justice pointed out, will help us to meet the challenges ahead and the social and interpersonal struggles that are and will be our lot in community life. These understandings, the House emphasizes, will also help us to fathom the nature of this paradigmatic shift that the Baha’i community is engaged in and will be engaged in for some time to come. They will also help me and you understand our own lives. Like salvation itself, this shift has no final point of attainment. Like salvation and like the spiritual realities behind it, the language behind this new culture of learning and growth is, as I say above, often allusive, poetic and abstruse because the reality it is attempting to reveal is often unseen, ephemeral and veiled. The concepts being put under the microscope do not lend themselves to simplistic definition, description and discourse. This is not to say that there are no quantitative, measurable and easily definable aspects to this new paradigm. But its overall conceptual place and role in the Bahai community, it seems to me, is often missed in the heat of discussion and the plethora of print now available on the subject as we go about with our yardsticks of quantitative measurement. Exaggerated expectations and ill-advised actions often hold latent as well as manifest dangers to the Cause, especially when put into print. Rigorous discipline on the part of Bahai writers has always been important in the history of the Cause and this may be true, a fortiori, within this new paradigm.

WHAT ROLE CAN YOU AND I PLAY?

The question as to what is the optimal role one can play as a Bahai is one of the dominating questions all of ones Bahai life. The answer or series of answers to that question is part of the lifelong journey at the heart of Bahai experience or so it seems to me and so it has seemed to me in my own life since the 1950s, since the beginning of the Ten Year Crusade when my mother became a Bahai and I was but in the first years of my late childhood(1953-1957.) Since those quiet years of the 1950s I slowly, gradually, came to understand that this Cause was giving me the very raison d'etre, the framework, the cosmology,the direction for my life and my very existence. I often think the Cause insinuated itself into my psyche when I was not looking; unobtrusively it came to be the dominant force in my life as I played sport, watched TV, developed my ego, superego and id--to draw on Freuds model of human development.

The teaching question challenges and torments, perplexes and in various ways befuddles the minds and consciousnesses of each person in the Bahai community and will do so for generations still to come. There is a certain anguish associated with the teaching process as there was in connection with this same process, although in a vastly different context, in the mind, the heart and the day-to-day experience of Shaykh Ahmad right at the start of this now two-and-a-half century narrative as one can read on page 1 of The Dawnbreakers.

SOME MORE THOUGHTS ON THIS NEW PARADIGM

The new Bahai paradigm has called for restructuring, redistribution and expansion of helping behaviours by those who ordinarily, who in the past, functioned as consumers of help, as consumers of Bahai programs and activities. Consumers in this new paradigm are to become much more producers as well as consumers. What matters about the Bahai writings in this new paradigm is something that has always mattered about these writings and that is their exemplary character, their capacity to firstly induce Bahá'ís to produce and secondly their capacity to put an improved apparatus, Bahai administration and the creative Force of this new Revelation, at the disposal of the Bahais. This apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers--that is, readers or spectators into collaborators. Walter Benjamin made this point in his article "The Author as Producer"(New Left Review I/62, July-August 1970) and Benjamin's idea applies a fortiori in the Bahai community in this new culture of learning and growth.

The result is an expansion of the help-giving resources quantitatively by converting helpees into helpers. The help is also changed qualitatively because the peers and the self-helpers possess an indigenous or inside understanding of the problems and the people to whom they offer help. Heins Kohut, a brilliant psychoanalyst, suggests that the key to therapeutic change may not be insight or understanding, but rather being understood. Who better to understand than those who have been there? But, of course, the whole process is far from simple. When one is dealing with a population of Bahais spread over nearly 200 countries and several million people one can not reduce the entire exercise to some simple paradigmatic explanation however much one tries or however much others may try. And often, new recruits often seem better informed than old veterans. For the times, it has often been said, are a-changin', to draw on old Bob Dylans model of societal experience in recent times.

THIS NEW PARADIGM AND COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY

This new paradigm, now in its second decade, has similarities to the new field of community psychology. The development of this sub-discipline within psychology required a shift in thinking from the individualism espoused by Western culture and the traditional practice of psychology to the embrace of a multifaceted, complex understanding of individuals within contexts. An emphasis on individualism and individual explanations limits the ability to create social change. In the field of psychology this was initially a revolutionary idea and it required more than an academic acknowledgment; it required a seismic shift in the foundation of thinking in the field of psychology. Many programs in which professionals in psychology aimed at helping individuals and communities in the last several decades failed to adequately address community needs and this had byproducts of dependency, a lack of ownership of ideas and a sense of identity with the group in the process. People were acted upon and not actors. Community psychology presents a vision in which power is exposed and turned on its head. Groups influenced by this shift in the dominant paradigm in psychology become groups where people who need help function as producers of help. Community psychologists have been intimately involved in the research and implementation of these groups. It is a trend which looks like it will continue to increase in the decades ahead.

THIS NEW PARADIGM AND SOCIOLOGY

I could also include here new theoretical constructs in sociology which have shifted the frameworks in that discipline as well; but such an inclusion would take this book too far afield from its central purpose. The social construction of reality, the Thomas and Luckman theory from the 1960s and enlarged upon for the last forty years, is one such area of sociology I could discuss here. That theory is not unlike the one discussed above in psychology and it has some interesting intellectual parallels to this new paradigm which some readers might like to pursue.

It is often easy to forget how difficult change can be for communities and organisations. To truly achieve change in a setting requires a complete re-evaluation of the relationships, rules and structures which comprise those systems. Resistance to change can be high and long-standing patterns of behavior are often difficult to reverse. This requires time, patience and consensus-seeking on the part of all the members. With this in mind, it is sometimes difficult to acquire, to develop, a long-term view when seeking community change, especially when program success is highly desired in the short-term and personal and community prestige are on the line. For change to endure, we must think about how the community will be affected 5,10, or 20 years down the road. No writing is more influential or encouraging in thinking about this process of change than Karl Weick’s book Small Wins, published 25 years ago in 1984. Weick described and defined 'small wins' as limited approaches to problems, approaches which reduce negative and emotional arousal and make progress more possible because this negative arousal is delimited. These minute steps often create a momentum which opens the door for more comprehensive changes.

THE INDIVIDUAL: THE WARP AND WEFT

Calling on every believer to respond to ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Divine Plan, Shoghi Effendi underscored the privilege to “initiate, promote, and consolidate, within the limits fixed by the administrative principles of the Faith, any activity an individual deemed fit to undertake for the furtherance of the Plan." Shoghi Effendi continued" "Without his support, at once whole-hearted, continuous and generous, every measure adopted, and every plan formulated, by the body which acts as the national representative of the community to which he belongs, is foredoomed to failure. The World Centre of the Faith itself is paralysed if such a support on the part of the rank and file of the community is denied it. The Author of the Divine Plan Himself is impeded in His purpose if the proper instruments for the execution of His design are lacking." When opportunities for action are seized, individual effort is characterized by courage, creativity, lofty aims, and enthusiasm.

The challenge that faces each believer is to find ways in which to serve the Cause. "Neither the local nor national representatives of the community, no matter how elaborate their plans, or persistent their appeals, or sagacious their counsels, nor even the Guardian himself, however much he may yearn for this consummation, can decide where the duty of the individual lies, or supplant him in the discharge of that task. The individual alone must assess its character, consult his conscience, prayerfully consider all its aspects and manfully struggle against the natural inertia that weighs him down in his effort to arise. In responding to the needs of the Cause, the individual must make a conscious decision as to what he or she will do to serve the Plan, and as to how, where and when to do it. This determination enables the individual to check the progress of his actions and, if necessary, to modify the steps being taken. Becoming accustomed to such a procedure of systematic striving and, it might be added, the systematic study of the Creative Word, lends meaning and fulfilment to the life of any Bahá’í.

The need to harmonize one’s initiative with collective action does not imply that the individual must wait for others to act or be hindered by their doubts and concerns. “Let him not wait for any directions,” the Guardian urges, “or expect any special encouragement, from the elected representatives of his community, nor be deterred by any obstacles which his relatives, or fellow-citizens may be inclined to place in his path, nor mind the censure of his critics or enemies.” “Be not grieved,” is Bahá’u’lláh’s own appeal, “if thou performest it thyself alone.” This need for harmony in the community, this need to teach, to demonstrate, to urge, to love and to encourage does not mean to force, be responsible for, nor be defeated by the present condition of our community. It is difficult; it is very difficult.

As the poet and philosopher Emerson once said: My tongue is prone to lose the way; not so my pen, for in a letter we surely put them better.(Emerson, Manuscripts and Poems: 1860-1869) This pioneer, in a period going back now fifty years, has often found that one way of doing something for another was: to write a letter, since the mid-1990s send an email and, since the late 1990s, post on the internet. Not endowed with mechanical skills and proficencies with wood and metal; not particularly interested in so many things in the popular culture like sport, gardening, cooking, heavy doses of much of the content in the print and electronic media; indeed, I could list many personal deficencies and areas of disinterest, I found the letter was one thing I could do and write and in the process, perhaps, document some of my sensory perceptions of the present age, perceptions that were relevant to the future of a religion whose very bones spoke of a golden age for humankind which was scarcely believeable, but was worth working for and was at the basis of my own philosophy of action in this earthly life. Hopefully my letters would evince some precision and, perhaps, for a future age they would be of value. I often wondered, though, how useful this interest, this skill, was in its apparent single-mindedness for it was not, as a I say, a popular sport! The exercise resulted, too, in a collection of many a dusty volume of paper which, as T.S. Eliot once put it with some emphasis, may in the end amount to an immense pile of stuff with absolutely no value or purpose. In the second decade of this new paradigm I deposited in the National Bahai Archives of Australia(NBAA) as a gift for some future student several 1000 of my letters and their replies. The letter has had a significant role to play in the unifying fabric of the planet in the Bahai community. It is one aspect of my individual initiative which has been useful in this new paradigm. In my retired life, retired form employment, I have more time to write letters and emails.

INADEQUACY OF PERSPECTIVE

There are many aspects of what is involved in our understanding and experience of this culture of learning and of growth and my comments here make a reflexive, a critical, and hopefully a useful, exploration of some of these aspects. Hopefully, too, members of the Baha’i community and interested observers will be assisted, in the process, in clarifying and adding to some of their own understandings, some of their misconceptions and confusions, if they have any. Confusion and dislocation, disempowerment and frustration have been reported in various national communities in relation to this new paradigm. In addition, it is often difficult to even know if one has any misconceptions and confusions unless one is confronted with views different from ones own and views which are challenging, realistic and framed within the context of the new paradigm. These words of mine at BLO aspire to play a heuristic, a clarifying role, through that collirium which is knowledge and understanding, a metaphor Abdul-Baha uses. I trust my aspiration is realistic and not seen as pretentious. I would be more than a little pleased, to say the least, if this book comes to have some value to readers. There has certainly been an inadequacy of Baha’i perspective and there have been inappropriate attitudes, at least from my point of view, which have developed in these first years regarding several fundamental issues involved in this new culture of learning.

Inadequacies of perspective are often the case on all sorts of matters in and out of the Bahá'í world in these difficult and complex times in which we live in our emerging and traumatized global society. Some readers may see my book, this far too-long essay, as not sufficiently critical of the new paradigm, not sufficiently challenging in its tone, challenging to what these same readers might regard as its underpinning of entrenched dogma from/of Bahai quasi-ecclesiatical authority; some readers of this book of 420 pages may, on the other hand, see my disagreements, however well-based, as a form of dissention and not sufficiently an echo of their view of a Bahai orthodoxy. The world and this new paradigm are not simple packages of data and concepts to be learned, experienced and understood. Like much of learning the Ruhi experiment is not like memorizing the multiplication tables, the names of the Kings of England and a pile of stuff for an exam. This new paradigm is not some rigid formula to be applied simplistically in a series of lock-steps.

SOME COMMENTS ON THE RUHI INSTITUTE

Some critics of the learning processes involved in the Ruhi institute programs around the Bahai world have expressed the view that the courses are a form of monkey-see-and-monkey-do, programs based on parrot-like repetition, rigid and fundamentally flawed formula harkening back to anachronistic Shiite traditions of taqlid which Bahaullah abolished over a century ago. This, it seems to me, is a somewhat harsh rendering of the Ruhi institute learning process and its sequence of books, a rendering found among the unloving critics of this core element of the new paradigm. As Paul Lample describes in his excellent new book Revelation and Social Reality: "the focus is on raising up thoughtful, creative protagonists of the progress of the Faith, nor mere technicians implementing a fixed methodology or formula for expansion." (p.83) As the House expressed the nature of the oft'-criticized Anna's presentation in Book 6, the presentation should "give rise to a conversation between two souls-a conversation distinguished by the depth of understanding achieved and the nature of the relationship established."(Ridvan, 22010)

My book does not provide a minute analysis of the sequence of Ruhi books, an analysis one can find in other places both on and off the internet. Those Ruhi enthusiasts in the Bahai world--and there are millions now--may find this book sadly lacking in what they hoped to find here: a detailed exposition of the permutations and combinations of this learning program used, as it is, at the grassroots level to train individuals to develop their skills and attitudes, their values and the knowledge base they need. The aim, among the many aims of the Ruhi institute program, is to succeed in instilling in its participants the capacity, as well as the confidence, to embark on service activities aimed at gradually uplifting the wider community. The messages and letters from the elected and appointed institutions of the Cause provide more than enough detail for readers without me going into yet more detail.

A sincere longing for being of use and helping one’s surroundings is a natural driving force that most people have who call themselves Bahais. In the Baha’i Faith, love and service to mankind are regarded as “the worthiest and most laudable objects of human endeavor”, through which Bahais can also develop virtues and spiritual qualities within themselves. The Ruhi Institute, as I point out elsewhere in this book, is an educational system that was originally developed under the guidance of the Baha’i community of Colombia in the 1970s. It is now being used all over the world and is at the core of this new paradigm. Based on the Writings of the Baha’i Faith, the material aims at giving its participants an understanding of the many presented topics, not only on a level that generates reflection and analysis, but, more crucially, on a level that facilitates action and change.

The main sequence of books in the institute consists of seven booklets of what is essentially a core curriculum, each with a specific theme and an act of service tied to some of them. The books are studied in study circles consisting of one tutor and several participants. Some of the themes of the main sequence are “Reflections on the Life of the Spirit” and “Teaching Children’s Classes”. The last book of the sequence is a book focused on tutor training, after which the participant herself/himself can serve as a tutor should they desire. As this paradigm has developed the role and structure of the institute with its several critical elements: board, coordinator, tutors, study circles and participants have all come under increasing analysis and scrutiny. The House provided some seminal statements in relation to this analysis in its Ridvan message of 2010.

The Ruhi Institute has come to spread all over the world, being used by Baha’is and their friends from the Kiribati Islands in the South Pacific Ocean to the Faeroe Islands and Iceland in Northern Europe. Of course, culture, weather and tradition influences the shape and expression of the study circles in different corners of the world, but they all have in common the purpose of educating and training their participants to be of service to their fellow beings and to mankind. The detailed analysis of the minutiae of this program, as I say, is found in many other places, and I do not go into this kind of detail in this book, I'm sure to the disappointment of some readers who were hoping for a comprehensive delineation of the entire Ruhi program and its institutional expression. Perhaps, as this paradigm advances in the years ahead I may give this sequence of books the kind of description and analysis it deserves due to their importance in this new paradigm.

The evolving institute boards oversee the institute process as a wholelargely through the periodic reports of the coordinator and through occasional and varied consultations among the many participants in the institute programs. The reports to the National Spiritual Assemblies are through the Regional Bahá'í Councils. The Boards consult with the Councils regularly concerning the role of the institute to provide human resources to meet the teaching needs of the region. Regional Bahai Councils(RBCs) were established in certain countries at the start of the second year of this new paradgim. The characteristics and functions of these Councils were outlined in a letter found at: http://bahai-library.com/uhj_regional_councils_policies. RBCs are to be regarded as "expert advisers and executive assistants" to the NSAs.

Like prayer, fasting, the celebration of Feasts and holy days, indeed, in the entire panoply and pageantry of Bahai individual and community life and its activities there is a great freedom. "The quality of freedom and its expression, the very capacity to maintain freedom in a society undoubtedly depends on the knowledge and training of individuals and on their abilities to cope with the challenges of life with equanimity."(House letter, 28/12/88)This framework of freedom depends on the recognition of the mutuality and balance of benefits and on the spirit of cooperation maintained by the willingness, the courage, the sense of responsibility and the initiative of individuals. These activities are not a prison-house of musts and shoulds and or-elses. The oft-heard phrase over the years: "this is the only way to do it," is an orientation that the Bahai community has been trying to get away from in this new paradigm. The whole idea of the existence of simple formula to follow in order to find the sources of success has long been abandoned as a wide range of approaches to teaching are being encouraged in Bahai community life. This does not mean, of course, that many individuals do not seek simple formula to apply. Ours is an instant society with often high and unrealistic expectations and an emotional unwillingness to accept that failure is often the best recipe for learning.

QUANTITATIVE GOALS AND HARMONY OF APPROACHES

Many, if not most, of the quantitative goals in Bahai community life in the half century I have been participating and watching the process have been achieved. But with qualitative goals the story is far different. We achieve them, it seems to me, mostly in part like so many things in our Bahai lives. This is an observation of my Bahai experience going back as it does to 1953. Win-win is not always possible on every front for: to ere is human and making mistakes seems to be one of our main methods of learning. To know things, in many ways, we must act upon them, displace, connect, combine, take apart and reassemble them. In writing one does all of these things. Hopefully this process of writing results in behavioural change on my part. I do all these things while I write and I do them in relation to this new paradigm, this new culture of learning and growth. I also do them within the limits of my incapacity, my inexperience and my lack of knowledge and understanding, as we all do when we write, talk and engage with our environment in a process called living.

The firm and impregnable ediface of this new Faith, the Bahai Faith, has been raised and preserved by the inscrutable wisdom of Providence. The Bahai community around the world, united by this Book and by Centres of authority, is challenged from time to time by paradigmatic shifts: wise, simple and beneficent but not implemented always and everywhere in the same way, with the same set of understandings and level of enthusiasm. These various modes of implementation in the Bahai world could all be viewed as equally appropriate to the conditions but often inappropriate by the critic. Toleration of the inevitable diversity of implementation produces a concord of views; insistence on uniformity produces discord. Where a mild spirit of toleration prevails and not the zeal of fanaticism--the I am right and you are wrong and/or this is the only way attitude--harmony existed and has existed in the Bahai community. And when this harmony prevails the distinctively different approaches insensibly coalesce into one great forward movement united by Book, institutions, manners and the use of language. The process is not easy, not always harmonious and not always successful. One could hardly expect otherwise in a community of several million souls across some 200 countries in the world.

MAKING ONE'S MARK

Hopefully, as I do battle with the phantoms of what is often my wrongly informed imagination and the imagination of others; and even though I often feel ill-equipped to interpret the social commotion at play throughout the planet as do millions of my contemporaries, still I feel prompted to action and to fulfil the intentions of this Plan as I have tried to do in previous Plans for the last half century. Perhaps, hopefully, I will make my mark at this crucial turning point in history, a turning point which may well be the most awesome, the greatest and most eventful in the long history of humanity. After more than fifty years of association with this Cause hopefully I have learned a thing or two. One could hardly expect otherwise. As Gibbon noted, providing an importantly cautionary note: individuals often advance in knowledge and truth but they proportionally decline in their practice of virtue. That is why, among other reasons, Bahaullah also wrote to the Bahais another cautionary but quite profound note, summarizing in the process the entire Kitab-i-Iqan; namely, that none of us should judge this Cause by the behaviour of its members. After several thousand years of other traditions based on revelation, this should be obvious to all of us. But Bahaullah puts this idea right up front in one of His central works: lest we forget.

The acquisition of knowledge often does not really engage the minds of many who abhor the fatigue and disdain the advantages of study. The pleasures and resources of solitude and the necessity of silence are not everyone's cup of tea in this electronic age of supersaturated media. Enthusiasm and care for the body and the senses often takes precedence over that of the mind and its care or care for society. Without this kind of concern or ‘caritas’ there is no agency. In this new culture of learning such attitudes and inclinations regarding the mind, the cultural attainments of the mind, that first attribute of perfection which 'Abdul-Baha gave primacy to, gave an especial emphasis, in His Secret of Divine civilization are to be fostered anew. In this new culture of learning the words of Ayn Rand are useful to keep in mind given the emphasis placed on learning in groups. "Civilization," wrote Rand, "is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. (The Fountainhead) In this new paradigm there is a balance between man's solitude and his social existence, his public and his private self. Of course, for some, the balance will tip more for learning in the public sphere and, for others, their learning will be primarily in a private context. In an expanding Bahai community of millions of souls it could not be otherwise. This is but another example of the pervasive nature and reality of unity in diversity in the Bahai community.

There is much that is incomprehensible in the growth of this Cause and much that can not be anticipated no matter how organized the plan or program, no matter how competent or incompetent the souls who must implement these plans and programs. But there is much that requires little understanding, that can not possibly elude our inquiry and only requires simple action. The spirit of doubt and delay, the lack of any real sense of urgency which commonly adheres to pusillanimous and skeptical minds and which Shakespeare describes in Hamlet is his famous soliloquy "to be or not to be," has a profound effect on Bahai Plans and will also affect this new culture of learning as it has Bahai culture since its inception. Shakespeare wrote that: "....the native hue of resolution/ is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought,/And enterprises of great pitch and moment/With this regard their currents turn awry/And lose the name of action." If an individual's sense of personal interest in possessing high resolve and endeavour, in acquiring a breadth of knowledge and an ability to solve difficult problems of benefit to the community--if these things are not aroused, not excited, in some way; if the sense of industry and application loses its force and languishes in the glitter and tinsel of an affluent society, the culture of learning and growth is to that extent delimited.

I do not break any new ground in this literary exegesis but, rather, just look over a patch in an intellectual action-oriented garden which has been laid out in the last few years. I try to profit from the work of other gardeners and to achieve as much lucidity and beauty of expression as my skills permit--for beauty of expression has come to interest me more and more in recent years, however elusive such an expression may be. Exegesis is a methodical search for meaning without which the Word of God would be inapplicable and pointless. Every proclamation, every study, every activity, of the Faith that goes beyond pure quotation, every translation into another language, even reflection about the revealed Word, the search for meaning in pectore, is ultimately exegesis. And so, while I may not break any new ground, perhaps these words may offer light on a complex subject.

INTERPRETATION THEORIES OF HISTORY AND AUTHORITY

Interpretations by the believers are not at all forbidden. In fact, they "constitute the fruit of man's rational power." However, Bahá'u'lláh has monopolised authoritative interpretation by transferring it to 'Abdu'l-Bahá in the Kitáb-i-Aqdas and the Kitáb-i-Ahd. 'Abdu'l-Bahá in turn designated Shoghi Effendi as the authoritative interpreter of Scripture in His Will and Testament. Establishing an auctoritas interpretativa simultaneously implies the exclusion of any other interpretative voice that claims any authority. In his Law-i-Ittid (Tablet of Unity) Bahá'u'lláh abolished the institution of the clergy. Thus, there is no separate class of divines in the community of Bahá'u'lláh who, such as the 'ulamá' in Islam to expound religious law or religious meaning with binding authority.

The centres of authority in the Bahai community are combinations of the three clear-cut grounds for legitimate authority outlined by Max Weber: legal, traditional and charismatic. The powerful prestige of a prophetic message, Weber emphasized, though, makes that message prevail in the end over all competing creeds in the form of its institutional permanence and in the routinization of the charismatic Force that gave it birth. History's dynamic element is and has been the charismatic breakthroughs of great men or what Bahais call manifestations of God. The charismatic inspiration becomes a style of life within a distinct community and over time the dominant orientation of a whole civilization. The central tenets of this inspirational Source emerge, also over time, from a variety of orthodox and heterodox views. The conflicts between rule-making administrators and various interest groups in history became a tangle of bureaucratic manoeuvres without public accountability, Weber argues. But these problems are not present in the Bahai system, the Bahai paradigm. But the road ahead within this new paradigm will not be an easy one. As Weber concluded, "the only hope for escape from the icy darkness and hardness of our time, our age, lay in the hands of the very figures who are excluded from sociological analysis-the advent of entirely new prophets."(Max Weber, "The three types of legitimate rule," Berkeley Publications in Society and Institutions, Translated by Hans Gerth, 1958, p.182.

This is not the place, though, to expand on theories of history. This would be far too complex a subject to deal with in the context of this paradigm. This new paradigm cannot be separated, though, from historical and, indeed, many underpinning frameworks from the social sciences and their specific action- oriented sub-disciplines of study.

INDIVIDUAL STYLE OF ONE'S INVOLVEMENT IN THIS NEW PARADIGM

God is the divine artificer fashioning a civilization and each of us is slowly being empowered or disempowered, as the case may be and as I mentioned above, to become co-creators in fashioning God's poem from the earthly materials of our lives, our clusters, our study circles, our LSAs, our Bahai communities, our resource materials--Ruhi and other--and much, much else. The art that is our lives gives, if it is effective, a permanence to some of what seems ephemeral, because this art has the capacity to give concrete form to the spiritual verities by freezing a moments vision into lasting image, however imprecise and allusive. Our participation in Baha’i community life could be said to be a fitful tracing of a portal, a window in the physical world through which we gain a fleeting glimpse of the eternal reality. I repeat myself here and I repeat the words of John Hatcher because I think what this professor of English at an American university writes is crucial, at least for me, in understanding this entire process of learning, of growth and of paradigm shifts as well as of my life and society. What is required is not so much a denial of self but an affirmation and fulfilment of self, an expression of the self through the achievement of a more inclusive identity which is, in turn achieved through a greater involvement with others. Central to this paradigm shift is a greater involvement with others.

The degree, the type and the style of the social involvement is, of course, different for each of us. Each of us has a different capacity for social engagement in this social religion as Horace Holley once called the Bahai Faith. Indeed, the very process of our spiritual development, of acquiring what are essentially intangible spiritual realities, of learning the subtleties of spiritual development gradually, daily, but being aware that the process is useful, necessary and possible, involves learning how to make appropriate responses to various circumstances and how to initiate certain kinds of actions. This is all part of our self-knowledge and involves failures, tests, difficulties, suffering, discovering our limitations, our imbalances, immaturities and imperfections as well as our talents and capacities. Each of us will play different parts, experience different degrees of intense inner life, attain different capacities for mature relationships and possess varying degrees of social conscience in the wider society in which we live.

This paradigm shift in the life of the Bahai community, therefore, will mean different things to different Bahais. We will each and all do different things; we will not all do the same things at the same time and in the same way. The House of Justice, for example, outlined a dozen specific things Bahais can do to find a fulfilling path of service within this new paradigm--and especially for those Bahais who do not want to take part in the institute process.(See "Talk by Stephen Hall," in The Australian Bahai March 2009.) But whatever path of service one takes, whatever way an individual decides to contribute his or her part to the betterment of the world and to this new and very precious Cause, the purpose of such contributions, whatever contributions, they are always secondary to the main purpose that animates the Bahá'í. That purpose is to assist the people of the world to open their minds and hearts to the one Power that can fulfil the ultimate longing of humanity for peace and justice in society as well as the one Power that can bring the human soul to what Bahaullah calls the Ancient of Days. Given the menu of activities in this new paradigm people of any temperament and whatever their experience in life can contribute. There is a place in this community for virtually anyone whosespirit is touched by this new revelation.

There are many sources in Bahá’í history and in the Baha’i writings to help us to obtain a more adequate understanding of: (a) the role each of us can and should play, (b) this turning point and (c) how this Revelation relates to this new culture of learning and of growth in the life of the community. Hopefully, these sources will help us find a context for the discussion of several relevant fundamental questions which have arisen in this decade-long exercise. We need to be on our guard that in making merely superficial adjustments in the context of the glitter and tinsel, of the oscillations and fragments of our group activity, of the innumerable fleeting moments, these adjustments will themselves fulfil the tasks at hand. Far otherwise. I trust the lengthy journey of words in this book across this terrain of Bahai activity and the part my study plays in my larger work, my memoir, will not be in any way intimidating and will not be lacking in a good deal of common sense as I explore the nature of the process in which the Baha’i community is currently involved. Perhaps the absence of footnotes, an absence I was unable to correct when I posted this commentary at Baha’i Library Online, will simplify this 190,000 word piece of writing on the recent paradigm shift and make it less intimidating. Perhaps readers can eliminate their academic concerns about who said what and when and where. If the more academically inclined readers at BARL find this impossible to do, if they find that virtually no footnotes is annoying to their scholarly sensibilities, then they can write to me at my email address and I will happily snailmail them a footnoted copy. My email address is: ronprice9@gmail.com.

The desirability of engaging in this culture of learning and growth is taken for granted, although I am sure that for many my exercise in analysis is not needed, nor wanted, nor seen as even remotely necessary. There has developed in recent decades a burgeoning of print in all fields and I'm sure for many my exposition here will be seen as just another addition to this expanse of analysis that is part of what for many is a sea of overwhelming printed matter. This sea is so deep that it drives people back to the movies, to leisurely pursuits of a more manual nature and to the simple life, as simple as possible as Henry David Thoreau used to say was the goal of life. Who wants to drown in the sea? What has already emerged on this subject in the last dozen years, as well as the dozen or so years that clearly led up to this paradigm shift(say 1982-1996) as we look back with the advantage of hindsight is no mean body of print to engage the mind. I'm confident that this book will remain largely unread, but that is true of so much print today, as I say, given the burgeoning of the print media especially in the audio-visual age our culture is immersed in on a daily basis and which often takes precedence, primacy and great slices of time in the lives of the votaries of all Faiths in the West where the electronic media has become so pervasive.

THE PROCESS OF WRITING AND ESPECIALLY WRITING ON THE INTERNET

The process of publishing has been made easier for writers in the last decade due to internet-technology. There are now thousands, if not millions, of writers like myself who publish on the internet. Writers, both off and on the internet, who find themselves published to an increasing extent are often asked to make their aims explicit and their goals frank--up-front--as it is often said these days. Sometimes writers engage in what T.S. Eliot once said is an intolerable struggle with words and meanings. For me, this process with words is more pleasure and, whatever struggle I am involved with, it is far from intolerable. I hope readers benefit from my pleasures even if they find my writing a little too verbose for their personal tastes, a little too expansive and abstract and my sentence construction too complex and long-winded for their personal literary proclivities. May my style be a bridge to substance for readers who persist with this work.

Not having abilities and interests in many avenues of life, not wanting to occupy my leisure time with gardening, extensive use of hobby apparatus, house repairs and fix-it jobs, great quantities of TV watching, shopping and cooking, educating children, adolescents and adults as I did for decades, among other activities, I settle for a little cleaning and laundry, meals and dishes, watching TV and visiting friends, pleasing my wife and emptying the garbage in these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood(60-80). Writing has slowly developed over the decades, by sensible and insensible degrees, into an occupation, a vocation, an avocation that brings me great pleasure. If others can share in my pleasure, get pleasure from my writing, what further delight can I ask? As Abdul-Baha wrote in another context: there is no greater bliss, no more complete delight.

As the years of this new paradigm shift have developed from, say, 1996, through a four year plan(1996-2000), a one year plan(2000-2001) and two five year plans(2001-2006) and (2006-2011) the Bahai world, the secular world and my own personal world have seen immense changes, some would say paradigm changes. My autobiography only touches on these changes. Even at 2500 pages and five volumes, this memoir can only skim the surface of these Plans and of nearly seventy-five years of recent history: three-quarters of a century or more back to the first Seven year Plan(1937-1944) or more than a century if I go back to the birth of my parents--in what appears to be the darkest in the history of civilization with a catalogue of horrors unknown to even the darkest of ages past.

Not finding a soft or a hard cover with some bright colour to attract a reading public, this book will most likely remain in cyberspace. It will be read by a few, a select few I like to think. But I am inclined to think that there will be even more readers in cyberspace than there would have been if this article got into the hands of traditional publishers and found a soft or hard cover. It is for these readers, then, whoever they may be, that I write. As I indicated above and as I reiterate here: in the first two years that I have had this site published on the internet several thousand clicks have been registered at this book. It is difficult to measure dialogue by clicks, but such is one of the measuring sticks in this cyberage. In the end, though, I must write for myself--as I say above--to help relieve some of the complexity and burden, to clarify and enlarge some of my own thinking. I look forward, as I write, to my enjoying the act of discovery as I make room for new and fresh ideas, as I come--always hopefully--to find those wings of human life that are found in the art of writing; and as I come to find that ladder for my ascent, another epithet Bahá'u'lláh uses to describe the arts. Perhaps, as I go along, my mind will be awakened and enlarged and some of the veils will be lifted from the receptacle that is my thought and the beauty of the world will be perceived with greater clarity and, with that beauty, a greater understanding of this new paradigm of which we are all a part each in our own ways. This book is part of my own pursuit of the success that is excellence not the success in the pursuit of dominance, not part of a competitive struggle with others.

For years I tried to write stories, novels, sci-fi, but as the years of my life lengthened I seem more destined to write books, non-fiction work and poetry and not fiction, stories, narratives of many kinds. This book is one such effort on this seemingly predestined path of essaying, of sailing on the shoreless sea of words. For years, too, it was my hope that I would be an engaging speaker that "my voice might be raised in great assemblies and from my lips might stream the flood of His words," or something to that effect. But I was not invited to give talks living as I did: among the Inuit in Canada, the Aboriginals in Australia or among Iranians in large cities like Perth and Melbourne Australia; or living in a small mining town, small and remote towns in parts of Australia that were so hot that listening to a talk was the last thing people wanted to help them brighten their life and to help them cool off. I seemed destined for analysis done in a small room with no one to read the products of my overworked brain except, it now seems, in this new space, cyberspace.

When the internet came along, well......more on that later. For years, too, for decades, from the age of 15 to 55, I had a much higher degree of social involvement but in these years of my late adulthood(60 to 80) I did not want to keep up that pace of intense social life. My voice is now raised in the form of written expression. Each of us goes through great changes along our lifespan and the part each of us plays in any paradigm is partly a result of where we are in our life journey, of what type of temperament and personality we have and of what taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and of dreams we have on our tongues and in our minds and hearts in that part of our personal journey. The part I play in this new paradgim is very different as my particiaption heads toward the end of its second decade. When this new Bahai culture began in 1996 I was a teacher in a college, served on an LSA, was an active member of a large Bahai community and now, 15 years later, my wife and I are the only Bahais in a small town and I am retired from the job world. And this is true for all Bahais: their role in the new Bahai paradigm depends on their personal circumstances which, in turn, depend on where they are in the lifespan.

INTERNET TEACHING

I would like to make some remarks about this internet work which has coincided with this new culture of learning. In the first year after I retired from FT work, July 1999 to July 2000, Google officially became the world's largest search engine. I had only begun to engage in internet activity and an extensive use of emails in the Four Year Plan(1996-2000). With Google's introduction of a billion-page index by June 2000 much of the internet's content became available in a searchable format at one search engine. In the next several years, 2000-2005, as I was retiring from PT work as well as casual and most volunteer activity that had occupied me for decades, Google entered into a series of partnerships and made a series of innovations that brought their vast internet enterprize billions of users in the international marketplace. Not only did Google have billions of users, but internet users like myself throughout the world gained access to billions of web documents in Google's growing index.

In 1994, at the age of fifty, as I was beginning to eye my retirement from FT work as a teacher and lecturer and as this new paradigm was about to be launched, Microsoft launched its public internet web domain with a home page. Web site traffic climbed steadily and episodically in that Four Year Plan, the years 1996 to 2000. Daily site traffic of 35,000 in mid-1996 grew to 5.1 million visitors in 1999. Throughout 1997 and 1998 the site grew up and went from being the web equivalent of a start-up company to a world-class organization. I retired from FT work at just the right time in terms of the internet capacity to provide me with access to information by the truckload on virtually any topic. This new technology had also developed sufficiently to a stage that gave me the opportunity, the capacity to post, write, indeed, “publish” is quite an appropriate term, on the internet at the same time. From 1999 to 2005 then, as I also released myself from FT, PT, casual and most volunteer work, Google and Microsoft offered more and more technology for my writing activity. My life had experienced a paradigm shift certainly one of its major shifts in the first seven decades of my life, in the years 1943 to 2009.

There are now several hundred thousand readers engaged in parts of my internet tapestry, my literary product, my creation, my immense pile of words across the internet--and hundreds of people with whom I correspond on occasion as a result. This amazing technical facility, the world wide web, has made this literary success and teaching enterprise possible. If my writing had been left in the hands of the traditional hard and soft cover publishers, where it had been without success when I was employed full time as a teacher, lecturer, adult educator and casual/volunteer teacher from 1981 to 2001, these results would never have been achieved. Bahai teaching entered a dramatically new phase.

I have been asked how I have come to have so many readers at my website and the tapestry or jig-saw puzzle of writing I have created across the internet. My writing is just another form of published writing in addition to the traditional forms in the hands of publishers. The literally hundreds of thousands of readers I have at locations on my tapestry of prose and poetry, a tapestry I have sewn in a loose-fitting warp and weft across the internet, are found at over 8000++ websites where I have registered: forums, message boards, discussion sites, blogs, locations for debate and the exchange of views. They are sites to place essays, articles, books, ebooks, poems and other genres of writing. I have registered at this multitude of sites, placed my literary products there and engaged in discussions with literally thousands of people, little by little and day by day. I enjoy these results without ever having to deal with publishers as I did for two decades without any success, without ever having to knock on doors, go to study circles or even open my mouth. Cyberspace is a teaching medium, like the advanced in the print and electronic media, which has brought a whole new world of teaching possibilities to Bahais and, as I see it, is part of that new paradigm.

The last nine years of internet posting, 2001-2010, have been immensely rewarding. When one talks one likes to be listened to and when one writes one likes to have readers. It is almost impossible, though, to carry literary torches as I do through internet crowds or in the traditional hard and soft-cover forms, without running into some difficulties. My postings singe the beards of some readers and my own occasionally. Such are the perils of dialogue, of apologetics, of writing, of posting, indeed, I might add, of living. Life's perils, the problems we experience in our relationships, verbal or in writing, often stimuate. The heavier the blow the stronger the stimulus is an aphorism with many an example in history.(See Toynbee, A Study of History, Volume 2) Toynbee writes of those who are disabled in various ways and have used writing, poetry and the arts to exercise a potent influence on their culture and this is true for many Bahais in this new paradigm.

Much of writing and dialogue in any field of thought derives from the experience each of us has of: (a) an intimate or not-so-intimate sharing of views in some serendipitous fashion or (b) what seems like a fundamental harmony or dissonance between what each of us thinks and what some other person thinks. In some ways, the bridge of dialogue is immensely satisfying; in other ways the gulfs over the valleys of life are unbridgeable. When the latter is the case and when a site is troubled by my posts, I usually bow out for I have not come to a site to engage in conflict, to espouse an aggressive proselytism but, rather, to stimulate thought and, as I say, share views. When I see that my participation in a group is also a cause of tension and conflict I also bow out, take alower profile. Dissention is a moral and intellectual contradition for those who would be peacemakers and unifiers of the children of men.

The new stage which has opened with this paradigm shift has required of Bahais a fundamental rethinking of the presentation of Baha’u’llah’s teachings, a simple but radical shift. The internet has provided for thousands of Bahais--and certainly for me--a medium for implementing this shift. It does a disservice to the mission of Bahá’u’lláh, to the World Order which He has come to establish, to focus the public message in religious categories. This talk by Douglas Martin was, for me, a heuristic and stimulating contribution to the up-and-coming discussion on the new Bahai paradigm. That talk was one of the earliest intimations of the new direction that the Baha’i community was about to take in the next decade. That talk was, it seems to me as I look back in retrospect at nearly sixty years of my association with this universal system, part of a decade-long warm-up(1986-1996) to the paradigmatic shift of the mid-1990s. Bahai history has many of these so-called warm-ups or shifts which go by many names: a hiatus or delay, a discontinuity or continuity, interval or interstice, interlude or intermission, suspension or termination. The Bahai timetable is full of stages and phases, chapters and states, scenes and settings, epochs and eras, periods and cycles.

To shift the focus from an "us-them" dichotomy, with insiders and outsiders, and to present the Cause in a radically different form has been no easy achievement. But it has been accomplished incremental step-by-step over the nearly two decades since Martin gave that talk. This is not to say that there is none of that old dichotomy between believer and non-believer present. One would not want to remove it entirely. There will always be outsiders, people who are not members of this Cause; there will always be Bahais who do not follow all the laws and ordinances of this Faith. The perceptions we each have of others and their obedience to direction are part of the experience of people in community.

Legitimate expressions of concern for the behaviour of others need not be viewed as criticism or intimations of a need for confrontation. All Bahais are in various degrees uninformed or disloyal. Perfection is elusive. The issues confronting the community are often very complex, perhaps necessarily so and they often require high levels of interpersonal skills, skills which are often simply lacking. Without the necessary skills conflict is sometimes inevitable. Wide latitudes for action, the avoidance of over-controlling personalities, a wide margin and tolerance for mistakes, being easily pleased with others and not endlessly fussy about all sorts of middle class proclivities and propensities--all these will help in the context of this new paradigm. But they are not qualities many people possess and even if many possess them, there are always the few who can make life difficult in community contexts. All the Central figures had to cope with these issues and personalities, these kinds of conflicts and tests. And it is part of the burden we, too, must bear if we are to refine our characters, contribute to an ever advancing civilization and to this new Bahai paradigm. The old maxim "possess the desire to please," and you will be a useful asset in your community.

The issues involve the Bahais in a fundamental dialogue with the wider society, a dialogue which has been slow in developing in the last several decades but which has been moving much more quickly in this new culture. Bahá'ís have responded to the challenges facing humanity in two ways: internally, by creating a promising operating model for a spiritually based world society which has embarked on an infinite series of experiments at the local, national and international levels in its efforts to realize the vision of mankind's oneness which it finds in the Writings of its Founder and of all the messengers of God. In this great undertaking all people of good will are free to participate. The Bahai community attempts to reflect the principles in these Writings and this is the basis for the model. In this new Bahai paradigm this process has been advancing significantly. Externally, the Bahai community aims to help heal the damage that inequality, injustice and ignorance have done to society. This, too, has advanced in many ways in the last 15 years.

The international Bahai community contains within it 2,100 ethnic groups speaking over 800 languages. In some nations minority groups make up a substantial fraction of the Bahai population; in the United States, for example, perhaps a third of the membership is African American, and Southeast Asians, Iranians, Hispanics and Native Americans make up another 20 percent. Racial integration of local Bahai communities has been the standard practice of the American Bahai community since about 1905. Women have played a major, if not central, role in the administration of local American Bahai communities, and of the national community, since 1910. American Bahai have been involved in education, especially in the fostering of Bahai educational programs overseas, since 1909.

Worldwide, numerous Bahais have become prominent in efforts to promote racial amity and equality, strengthen peace groups, extend the reach and effectiveness of educational systems, encourage ecological awareness and stewardship, develop new approaches to social and economic development, and promote the new field of conflict resolution. The Bahai Faith runs many radio stations in less developed areas of the world that have pioneered new techniques for educating rural populations and fostering economic and cultural development. The Faith also conducts over 1000 schools, primarily in the third world, as well as about 200 other literacy programs. Bahai communities sponsor hundreds of development projects, such as tree-planting, agricultural improvement, vocational training and rural health-care. It would be impossilbe to list them here. The Bahai international community is particularly active at the United Nations and works closely with many international development agencies. Many national and local Bahai communities have been active in promoting interreligious understanding and cooperation.

Bahá'í efforts in the field of social and economic development generally take the form of grassroots initiatives carried out by small groups of individuals in the towns and villages in which they reside. As these initiatives evolve, some grow into more substantial programs with permanent administrative structures. Yet very few can be compared with the kind of complex development projects promoted and funded by government agencies and large multilateral organizations. This is beginning to change in the context of this new paradigm.

The Mongolian Development Center--a Bahá'í inspired organization--offers training in health and nutrition, as well as in growing essential vegetables. The distinguishing features of the Bahá'í approach to development are the principles and processes being employed by Bahá'í communities around the world rather than the number or size of projects. In a very real sense, social and economic development activities are an expression of faith in action. Consequently, Bahá'í development initiatives are designed to engage and benefit all the members of a community and not just Bahá'ís.

At the heart of all Bahá'í development undertakings is the recognition of a deep and inseparable connection between the practical and spiritual aspects of daily life. Creating a desire for social change and instilling confidence that it can be achieved must ultimately come from an awakening of the human spirit. While pragmatic approaches to problem solving play a key role in development initiatives, tapping the spiritual roots of human motivation provides the essential impulse that ensures genuine social advancement.

TURNING TO FUNDAMENTALS

We must turn again and again to fundamentals, at least I feel I should as I discuss this new development in the religion I been associated with for over half a century, since 1953 when the Kingdom of God on earth made its beginning in Chicago unbeknownst to the wider world and even to the majority of the Bahais at the time I rather suspect. I say this for, in some ways, paradigm shifts like this are not some revolutionary new wave of thinking that has suddenly sprung up ex nihilo. A detailed and exact knowledge of all the terms and language involved in this new paradigm and of the many and varied applications of this culture of learning and of growth and of the diverse conditions prevailing around the world where this paradigm has been and will be applied, while valuable in themselves, are not what this book explores. This sort of detailed information cannot be regarded as the sort of knowledge, learning and understanding that I outline and explore in this now lengthy essay, although these details obviously underpin any comprehension of this paradigm, at least to some extent.

This detailed knowledge and this new language is explored elsewhere in many an essay, discussion paper, document, letter and internet post. It is explored in fine detail with definitions abounding and explanations tuned and retuned for various publics in and out of the Baha’i community. This book attempts an engagement with the content and the issues, an examination of this topic, hopefully, from a fresh perspective, a wide-angled lens, at an oblique, a slanting, a slanted direction. Some might even find my approach here too circuitous, roundabout, indirect--even tortuous and devious, not to say bent--goodness--hopefully not that. I hope not but, in writing as in life, one can not please everyone and one never knows how a reading public and particular individuals in that public will react to what one has written.

This literary and conceptual analysis moves on various and different paths from most of the analysis and discussion of the new paradigm that has been part of the Baha’i community for a dozen years--or so I like to think. I hope I am making a fresh, an original contribution to the discussion even if I am going over old ground. When this exposition goes over old ground, as it inevitably must, it is my hope that the paths on this ground are seen in a new way with new trimmings, new flowers along the edge and new-green grasses under the feet. Sadly, gardening is not my speciality and so I borrow from other gardeners perhaps too often to achieve my aims. But writing has been a tool I have been working on for decades and I have engaged in its discipline wilfully, dutifully and rigorously with the aim of developing the tools and the craft of this medium. Not possessing so many other tools in life, I have had to develop this one particular tool to pay the bills and survive in this practical world of practical people, to raise my family and to eat. The result, dear reader, is what you read before you, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health until death do us part as it is said in another context of life's commitments.

PREVIOUS PARADIGMS DRAWING ON THE IDEAS OF OTHERS: PERSONAL COMMENTS

I am going to expand here on an article which Moojan Momen wrote and give a special emphasis to an aspect from that useful article originally written in 2001(circa). Momen wrote about the same topic I am writing here and he provided for me some of the context in which I want to discuss this subject of the new culture of learning--at least initially. Thanks to Momen's capacity for analogical thought, a capacity which has enriched my reading of his work for years, I want now to comment on the change in culture that the Guardian initiated in the 1920s and 1930s. This change did not spring up ex nihilo within the Guardian’s action-oriented exegesis any more than other significant and paradigmatic shifts in the life of the Baha’i community have sprung up ex nihilo, out of nothing. Like most change in science and the arts, change occurs by what you might call a happy accumulation; an original approach is not invalidated just modified or given a particular emphasis. Thanks, too, to the literary and analytical efforts of some others writers, my article here expands on the work of others and tries to knit the material into one fine warp and weft, a carpet of fine thread for the mind. I try to draw on all this reading and my experience but I must admit to the difficulty of putting it all together and of composing with a unified, unidirectional literary and intellectual perspective. But as a serious writer, I am afflicted, perhaps compelled, to try. I enjoy what I find to be an exquisite sense of release and relief from getting the job done even if, in the process, any unified perspective I find along the way, fades a little and loses its gloss and focus. Writing, like life, has its dangers, its ups-and-downs; all is not consistency and clear sailing. The clearer and more evocatively that I write the more in touch with the realities of my subject that I feel even if, in the process, I lose some readers along the way.

To draw on Momen, Kahn and others as well as expand on their comments in relation to the work of the Guardian from 1921 to 1936 provides for me, if not for all the readers here, an irresistible comparison and contrast in concept and method with the changes in this most recent of shifts in our time and in the last years of my working life(1996 to 2005). In those years I headed out from the world of jobs and earning a living, raising a family and going to meetings, as well as listening and talking for at least eight hours every day and made a major shift in my own modus vivendi. I find the comparison with the work of Shoghi Effendi in those years after WW1, those entre-deux-guerres years as they are sometimes called, the paradigm shift he put in place and developed, although he would not and did not use the term paradigm, irresistible because retrospection offers dimensions of understanding which sharpen our perception of the current cultural and community shift in the life of this Faith I have been part of even as far back since 1953.

My parents, indeed, none of my family had come across the Bahai Faith in those years between the wars. It was not until 1953, the year that DNA, was finally discovered and worked out, that any contact between the Bahai Faith and my family was established. I was then aged nine. While my parents went though most of their young and middle adult life in the years 1921 to 1957, Shoghi Effendi was engaged in transforming the religion that had been entrusted to his care in 1921. Shoghi Effendi did much more than explain the texts; he directed and guided the community through a crucible of transformation that forged the Baha’i community that my parents came across in the 1950s. I don’t want to go into the details of this forging process. Glenford Mitchell did a fine job, one of the best I have read in the more than fifty years of my reading Baha’i inspired print, a fine job of delineating the objectives and purposes of this forging process some thirty-five years ago in World Order magazine. I leave it to readers to enjoy the pleasures of engaging in his well-written article in that very useful magazine that has been in print since the 1960s. This forging process of Shoghi Effendi had been preceded by decades of preliminary work, preliminary work laid down during the early lives of my parents(1895-1921) and my grandparents(1872-1921) and great-grandparents(1844-1872: circa). This 'preliminary work' is a story in itself; these two words are a simple expression for a complex process, a process that had taken place for decades, arguably eight decades, before this unassuming man assumed the reins of office in 1921. But it is not my purpose here to delineate this fascinating preparatory period, a preparatory period that led in time, to my own birth as a result of my parents meeting each other in the years of that first teaching Plan, 1937-1944.

The Guardian, that offspring of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s interpretive mind and co-sharer in the genius of divine interpretation, assumed his position as the legitimate successor of ‘Abdu’l-Baha, as Mitchell points out, a position which was and is difficult for people, for Baha’is, to estimate, to understand, to appreciate. An evaluation and understanding of the grandeur of the Guardian’s work, his role and status, his exegetical function, his place in the realm of words and actions, was difficult for the Baha’i community of that generation in those inter-war and intra-war years to understand. That generation was perhaps the first of the many generations of the half light that were to come. As the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay(1800-1859)once wrote in another context and in relation to another person, the historian and analyst needs some standard by which to make a comparison or a contrast--and the Baha’is had none vis-a-vis Shoghi Effendi; they had no standard by which they could measure and gain some historical perspective on his position. The Guardian’s role and station was, in a Baha’i context, unique in history. The Guardian died when I was thirteen and I had no appreciation of him and his role at that early age, although my mother had had contact with the Cause for four years by then and the Bahai Faith had spread its wings to over 200 countries in an international teaching enterprise than had been, in that four year period, quite beyond the wildest expectations of even the most optimistic believers-a period which could be termed a mini-paradigm shift in itself.

The preliminary steps, the precursors, of the Administrative system which Shoghi Effendi gave his paramount attention to building, to permanently and systematically establishing in those entre deux guerres years, had already been taken by ‘Abdu’l-Baha and even by Baha’u’llah in the years preceding His ascension in 1892. As I say, I will not outline these steps here. Shoghi Effendi has done this for us comprehensively in his extensive delineation of the first stirrings of the Baha’i Administrative Order in his magisterial work God Passes By. It is a work whose vision and whose elevation of history’s role provided the Baha’is with the majesty and meaning of the narrative of the first century of their history and its several paradigm shifts. In short, the cultural shift, the paradigm shift, that Shoghi Effendi was so instrumental in developing involved, among other things, what Horace Holley called and described briefly, referring as he was at the time to the Bahai community of the United States, as an evolution from a small and amorphous series of local groups to a national unit of a world society.”

The American Bahá’í community consisted of an informal network of groups, of “small pockets of ingrown and amorphous communities” in 1921 and by 1936 it had developed into “a vastly enlarged and well-organized religion with a national consciousness.” It was able, by 1936, to plan and to initiate a systematic, an international teaching campaign. It is this development, this organizational evolution, this alteration in the consciousness and direction of the Baha’i community that is involved in what Momen calls “a change in the Baha’i culture.” Momen draws on this paradigm shift to compare the present change in culture in the life of the Baha’i community in the last two decades. The change in culture initiated by Shoghi Effendi was, indeed, a gradual one characterized by phases, stages and transitions, breaks and continuities with the past which added up, in overview, to what very well might be called a multi-paradigmatic shift. During these years my parents were in their young adulthood for the most part, the years 20 to 40, making of their lives an event that would cast the pearl of "pure and goodly issue on the shore of life" and bring up "greater and lesser pearls." Would I be a greater or a lesser pearl? Time would tell and even my memoir leaves such a final question, such an ultimate outcome and question until the last syllable of my recorded time in life. Such is my belief in relation to quite a complex question whose answer I will not go into here in even the most cursory manner.

Reading the study of early Baha’i administration in the United States by Loni Bramson-Lerche in one of Kalimat Press's series of volumes on Babi-Baha’i history is instructive, but I will only comment briefly on her analysis here. Suffice it to say, the context for the change in culture that Momen refers to in the 1920s and 1930s, and that Bramson-Lerche describes in her informative description of the development of Baha’i administration from 1922 to 1936, is a useful one for us to examine here in our study of the change in culture that the Baha’i community is currently undergoing. The comparison and contrast between the two paradigm shifts is instructive and rich in its potential to cast light on our current culture change. The paradigmatic shift that the Baha’i community is now engaged in, like the one referred to between WWI and WW2, needs to be seen in context. For this most recent shift, like the one I have just referred to, did not spring up ex nihilo. Indeed, it seems to me that this most recent of paradigm shifts, is but another part, another stage in the long process of the Baha’i community providing the world with the long-awaited workshop by which the collective social advancement of civilization will support and work in concert with the individuals attempt to fulfil their inherent purpose.

The Baha’i paradigm, any Baha’i paradigm, has always been fundamentally a new, even if only an altered, institutional matrix. Of course, it can also be seen as merely an adjustment, an adaptation. The issue is partly a question of semantics, definitions, perspectives and meanings. The answers, the interpretations, given to these semantic issues of meaning all vary from individual to individual and one can get caught up in endless hairsplitting and casuistry, empty and profitless debate and a vain concatenation of thoughts that lead nowhere except to dispute and acrimony. For the Baha’is, the generations of the half-light in the 20th and 21st centuries, only a dim perception of the main features of this institutional matrix, this paradigm of paradigms, is achievable. We stand too close to its beginnings to appreciate either its potential or the relationships of its component parts, as the House of Justice once expressed the idea when I was but 25 and just starting my work in this administrative Order, this System. Those words from the House came in 1969 and they came when my work in this Order was just beginning. By 1969 I had been associated with this new order for more than 15 years beginning as that association did as far back as 1953 in sensible and insensible degrees right back to the beginning of the Kingdom of God on earth, a term used by 'Abdul-Baha for the year when the temple in Chicago would be finished.

THE AXIS OF THE ONENESS OF HUMANITY

After more than half a century since I joined this Faith, I can see some brilliant lights in the wide world that is the international Bahai community. There are also many dark shades and clouded visions of the whole, for we have only intimations of the subtle and hidden relationships between the component parts of this Cause. In these generations of the half-light we still see through a glass darkly. We probe the many mysteries of this new Order and seek to discover more and more of the picture it presents to our minds. We do this as a Bahai community year after year as this Order, this nucleus and pattern of a new society, spreads across the planet quietly in the hearts and minds of millions. For the Baha’i this is not a subjective statement but one of fact. The Baha’i paradigm, the Baha’i worldview, the Baha’i model, the Baha’i archetypal pattern or exemplar, is not, at its heart, an organization, an ideology, a cosmology, nor a framework for action among other possible definitions and applications of the term paradigm. It is, as Douglas Martin pointed out in the conclusion to a talk he gave in April 1992:

“a universal reality operating within every soul and between all souls. It is readily accessible to independent investigation and discovery. It is the axis of the oneness of the world of humanity. It is reality and ultimately it will engage the minds and spirits of all people because it is the nature of reality to do so.”

Martin’s words here are elusive, subtle and visionary; they are also provocative, enticing and stimulating to the imagination. For the Bahá’í this Cause is the paradigm of paradigms. Our world and especially our institutional world will be significantly centred on this Cause in the centuries ahead. From time to time this paradigm of paradigms needs a refinement, an extension, a variation, an adjustment, a series of fundamental transition phases, what some might call simply a shift. The new culture of learning and growth that has been underway since the middle of that fin de siecle in the twentieth century in the Baha’i community is part of this latest shift. Before going on in this book to discuss what is often called the triple impulse, an impulse within whose context I want to discuss this most recent paradigm shift, I would like to add some words about the paradigm shifts that have taken place in the wider context of society in the Bahai Era beginning as it does in 1844. These remarks will be brief, a sort of parenthesis which adds colour and texture, a certain fascination and interest, to the shift we are presently observing and in which we are taking part. Such is my aim and hope here in this part of the book.

MORE PARADIGMS: INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE CAUSE OF GOD

Parenthetically speaking, then, let me add that since 23 May 1844 there have been a number of major paradigm shifts in many aspects of the various secular and religious worlds within which the Babi-Baha’i world has grown and developed. Beginning on 23 May 1844 itself, to chose a starting point for the delineation of more than a century and a half of paradigm shifts, a starting point which is far from arbitrary for the Baha’i, let me enumerate but a few: on 23 May 1844, coincidentally, the first message was sent over a telegraph wire; in the summer of 1844 Karl Marx made his first contribution to the world of sociology, history and philosophy; to continue listing paradigms let us go into the world of science with Charles Darwins Origin of the species in 1859. One could go on and on, decade after decade into the 20th and 21st centuries, through the lives of Bahaullah, Abdul-Baha, Shoghi Effendi and the years of the House of Justice at the apex of Bahai administration, outlining a multitude of paradigmatic shifts in the wider society that accompanied the ones in the parallel universe of the emerging Bahai community.

For fear of prolixity, though, I will say no more and leave this fascinating and serendipitous series of juxtapositions to readers, juxtapositions they can find in the biological and physical sciences, in the social sciences and humanities, in society and everyday experience. The list of major shifts is staggering in magnitude and it virtually goes without saying to anyone with only a little familiarity with history and the contemporary society in which they are enmeshed. These shifts provide perspective, ambience, meaning and helpful overviews that can add a wider understanding to the process that is taking place before our eyes and has been for the last dozen years in the Bahai community itself. Since 1996 the paradigm shifts in culture and society, in science and technology, indeed, across the whole panoply and pageantry of our global society have been staggering in their magnitude. I have already referred to this above and I shall say no more on this theme here, although one can not limit its importance as a background to the paradigm shift in the Bahai community.

I would like to hypothesize that since my mother first joined this new Faith in 1953 there have been at least three major paradigm shifts in the Bahai community: 1953-1963; 1963-1996 and 1996 to the present or, perhaps, to 2021 the end of the first century of the Formative Age and, I would guess, its fifth epoch. I will discuss these shifts later in this 200 page sojourn. The future of my life, the life of my fellow Bahais, the life of all the people of the world is at the centre of this new culture of learning and growth in which we are all searching for a new voice, a new identity, a new tradition and the magical transformation that is taking place and has the potentiality to actualize in the decades ahead is quite magnificent. It is the combination of the best of many worlds, combining them and coming up with something new that is truly breathtaking.

THE TRIPLE IMPULSE

I would like now to turn to that triple impulse I referred to above. Whatever shift, whatever culture of learning and of growth that the Baha’i community is now going through, whatever phases and stages that have characterized it and will characterize it in the years ahead, they are each and all part and parcel of the three distinct but interrelated processes set in motion by “the triple impulse generated through the revelation of the Tablet of Carmel by Bahá’u’lláh, the Will and Testament and the Tablets of the Divine Plan bequeathed by the Centre of His Covenant.” I want to place this new culture, this new paradigm, within the context of this triple impulse. While discussing this triple impulse, I try as far as possible, and when relevant, to bring these three major foci into interrelationship with my own life and the life of my society. At the core of my memoir, my autobiography, now in five volumes, is another triple impulse: my society, my religion and my own life experience. As I indicated above, I feel I must apologize to readers for the inevitably quite personal context that they will find in the pages ahead as I go about connecting my own micro-world with the macro and the triple impulse I have just mentioned.

The immense significance of this paradigmatic shift in its first dozen years has coincided more than just serendipitously in retrospect with an almost incredible if often inscrutable alliance of social, economic and political forces in the wider world on the one hand and developments in that triple impulse I have already referred to on the other. To ignore this wider context, one within the Bahai community and the other in our global society, is to deprive this analysis, this exercise in the study of the new paradigm, of some useful, indeed, critical understandings of the new culture of learning and growth in which our international Bahai society is immersed.

THE FIRST IMPULSE

The construction work at the Baha’i World Centre is and was an historic thrust in the context of that first impulse. This vast, prolonged and costly building enterprize, relative to the small size of the Bahai community that took the project on, fulfilling even more than previous buildings and community achievements had done the glorious vision of the efflorescence on God’s holy mountain, is exerting, has exerted and will exert “a profound influence” on the worldwide Baha’i community. A series of developments at the World Centre: the completion of the Seat of the Universal House of Justice in 1984, the announcement in 1987 of the Arc Project which by 1988 had resulted in “the emergence of a new paradigm of opportunity” and which by 1989 had resulted in “heightened expectations” were all an expression in the world of concrete, marble and architectural reality of that first impulse generated well over a century ago just before the passing of Baha’u’llah in His revelation of the Tablet of Carmel. This tablet is, for the Bahai community, the Charter of the World Spiritual and Administrative Centres of the Faith on that mountain. This document established Mount Carmel as the physical location of the Bahá'í World Centre. This project, this Arc, these terraces, are yet another stage, a major stage, in the fulfilment of Bahaullahs words that: "Ere long will God sail His Ark upon thee, and will manifest the people of Bahá who have been mentioned in the Book of Names."

While all this was taking place, perhaps as far back as the 1970s when construction of The Seat began or even as far back as 1951 when Shoghi Effendi wrote about the rise of the World Administrative Centre of the Faith after a hiatus of thirty years(1921-1951), the Bahai community was developing and consolidating, a word that once used extensively in Bahai community life. My personal life within the context of this new Faith was also evolving along its lifespan. My autobiography, now in five volumes, charts my story, my narrative and the several paradigmatic shifts in the nature and expression, the form and the context of my Bahai life in its individual and community contexts. But I write only a little of that story here.

THE SECOND IMPULSE

This most recent change of culture, this historic paradigm shift, is also intimately connected to the second and third impulses specified above. The second impulse and this paradigmatic shift, I would argue, is part of “the striking impact” of the Holy Year and the publication during that same period of the Kitab-i-Aqdas, the Charter of Baha’u’llah’s World Order and a Book of phenomenal importance, a Book which opened “wider the door of a vast process of individual and community development.” That Holy Year of May 1992 to May 1993 witnessed: (a) “an auspicious juncture in the history of His Cause,” the hundredth anniversary of the commemoration of the Ascension of its divine Author and a celebration of the centenary of the inauguration of His Covenant; and (b) the implementation of Huququ'llah. All of this served as a prelude to this new paradigm. It was, indeed, part of a paradigmatic prelude, a prelude that could be seen as going back as far as the 1980s.

The Huquq became binding upon the believers in the West just four years before the implementation of the new paradgim. One of the developments in the first 15 years of this new Bahai culture has been an increased understanding of many aspects of the Huququ'llah. The Universal House of Justice has been primarily emphasizing the spiritual aspects of this law, in particular the attitude the believer must have. The House of Justice has not provided detailed explanations in many aspects of this law, preferring for the present time to leave these matters to the conscience of the friends. It is not my intention to go into details regarding the developments of Huquq in these early years of this new paradigm but they are part and parcel of the overall framework of Bahai life in this new Bahai culture, or so it seems to me.

During this paradigmatic shift the laws of the Kitab'i-Aqdas were reviewed by the House of Justice and it was seen as timely to implement an extension of those pertaining to prayer: the washing of hands and the repetition of certain specific verses. This was announced on 28 December 1999, one month after another announcement that: (a) there were "nearly 110,000" believers benefiting from training courses and (b) the paradigm of the culture of change for the next twenty-one years would be organized around a single One Year Plan and four Five Year Plans to take the Bahá'í community to 2021 and the end of the first century of the Formative Age. The context for this new paradigm was given a timeframe to the end of the first century of the Formative Age in 2021.

The erection of the buildings at the World Administrative Centre of the Faith “within the precincts and under the shadow of its World Spiritual Centre” is part of a process that has been underway, as I noted above, since 1951. The construction of the eighteen monumental Terraces are manifest expressions, it should be emphasized, of the emergence from obscurity of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh, an emergence which, like entry by troops, is very importantly process as well as event: indeed, the event could be seen as quintessentially a process. This emergence from obscurity, associated with the developments at the Baha’i World Centre, resulted in the increasing emphasis, especially as that “propitious Year” with its “vista of new horizons” concluded, on the process of entry by troops which the House of Justice pointed out Baha’i communities could “prepare for and help to bring about.” This emphasis on the process of entry by troops was foreshadowed in the Ridván Message of 1990 when the House pointed out that “almost one million souls entered the Cause” from 1988 to 1990.

Entry by troops was also not a new phrase or a new concept which suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It was also, as I say, a process, a process which the Guardian had referred to as far back as 25 June 1953, four decades before the beginning of the recent song and dance about the process which emerged on the dance floor in the 1990s. When the term began to be used extensively in the 1990s and when many Bahá’ís began dancing to this new tune, thinking it a new concept and thinking it meant masses of new believers entering the Cause, they slowly began to feel pangs of disappointment. When the familiar one or two, a few or none at all or even a decline in membership was experienced and the enrolment lists remained discouragingly meagre each month in the various Bahai newsletters in most of the Bahai national communities at least in western countries, many wondered what they were doing wrong. Eventually those with high, unrealistic expectations, often based on false assumptions regarding the processes involved, made the necessary emotional and intellectual adjustments to their system of suppositions and came to accept what Peter Khan had emphasized as early as 1996. He had pointed out, in one of his many fine talks in North America, that the key word in the expression “the process of entry by troops” was "process.” Indeed, one could argue that the process of entry by troops has been part of the Babi-Baha’i experience since the 1840s, if not in Islam itself 1300 years before. My autobiography tells of my own experience of this process as far back as the 1950s giving emphasis as I go along to the heyday of my experience of this process in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But more of this later, although my memoir is not the focus in this article at BARL.

THE THIRD IMPULSE

The third impulse, set in motion by the Tablets of the Divine Plan written in 1916 and 1917, appearing in part in Star of the West as early as 1916, unveiled in their entirety in 1919 and first formulated into a specific teaching Plan, the Seven Year Plan of 1937 to 1944, is at the basis of the recent emphasis on this process of entry by troops. For such a process to be successful now and in the years and decades ahead, a new culture of learning, a paradigmatic shift, is and will be required on a number of fronts. This was true in the 1950s when the Guardian first used the term in one of his letters and it has been true wherever and whenever large numbers of people entered the Cause or are part of the plans for their entry. In all likelihood it will also be true throughout the coming centuries and cycles during which Abdul-Baha said, in the first of those Tablets, many harvests will be gathered. I sometimes think that it was also true for those first Letters of the Living, the first Letters generated from the Primal Point, in May 1844. They, too, had to make a paradigmatic shift in their lives in the days, months and years when they were launched upon their mission of promulgating the message of the Bab. Not all of them were successful in implementing their own paradigm shift as Moojan Momen points out in his brief study of their lives in one of his many excellent essays. And not all of us will be successful in implementing our present paradigm shift nor will all the Bahai communities across the face of our planet in these early decades of this new millennium. We all achieve many things in our lives only in part: we see many things darkly but then face to face to draw on an old New Testament saying in relation to prophecy. After the first decade of the implementation of this new paradigm(1996-2006), as one writer has noted, "of the 16,000 clusters in existence some 10,000 remained unopened and less than 2% were capable of taking on the challenge of growth." Five years later one can only guesstimate that, perhaps, 8000 remain unopened.(Lample, p.104)

I would like to make some final and additional remarks about those Tablets since they form one of the three major foundation documents, one of the rocks, for all the teaching plans including this present paradigm. In the longest tablet in the entire collection Abdul-Baha writes not about where to teach, since he does this in the other tablets, but about what is required for success in teaching. The rest of the collection of what are in some ways letters is somewhat anticlimactic, at least for me. This Tablet caught my attention overforty years ago and it does so as I reread it for the umpteenth time. Here, it could be argued, is the true foundation of the Divine Plan for our age.

First, 'Abdu'l-Bahá talks about the term "Lord of Hosts", frequently mentioned in the Bible as one of the Names of God and in the Bahá'í Writings also used to refer to the Manifestation of God. I've always assumed that "hosts" merely indicates a multitude, so "Lord of Hosts" might be similar to "Lord of All". 'Abdu'l-Bahá makes reference here to an army, a heavenly army arrayed for spiritual rather than physical battle. Filled with the love of God, this army marches into metaphorical battle with its chief weapons being: character, conduct and words. Reminding us of the Apostles of Christ, He calls upon the Bahá'ís of the United States and Canada to become Apostles of Bahá'u'lláh and to go forth into the world and teach. There are some conditions, however, which must be met in order to achieve success:

Firmness in the Covenant of God
Fellowship and love among the Bahá'ís
Continuous travel by Bahá'ís to all parts of the world for the purpose of teaching
Purity of motive on the part of the teacher
Education of children
Translation of the Holy Writings into all languages

A few other things are mentioned as well. Taken together, these points form the bedrock upon which all of the activity of the global Bahá'í community since that time has been based. Perhaps most interesting of all, 'Abdu'l-Bahá chose to end this Tablet on this note:

In brief, O ye believers of God! The text of the divine Book is this: If two souls quarrel and contend about a question of the divine questions, differing and disputing, both are wrong. The wisdom of this incontrovertible law of God is this: That between two souls from amongst the believers of God, no contention and dispute may arise; that they may speak with each other with infinite amity and love. Should there appear the least trace of controversy, they must remain silent, and both parties must continue their discussions no longer, but ask the reality of the question from the Interpreter. This is the irrefutable command!('Abdu'l-Bahá, Tablets of the Divine Plan, p. 53)

GROWTH IN LIFE FORMS: USEFUL METAPHORS

In the study of human development, psychologists point out that human beings in their lifespan have two phases of growth ‘spurts’, one in infancy and one in adolescence. In between infancy and adolescence there is a period of steady growth; adulthood is when growth halts although, for millions now, weight gain insignificant. It seems to me that the Bahá'í Faith is now in the period between infancy and adolescence. There has been an initial ‘spurt’ and there has been a steady growth; the Bahá'í community in this new culture of learning and growth will, it seems to me, experience that second spurt of adolescence. Of course, it could be argued that this Cause has had a series of spurts and in the decades to come it will experience another series of spurts. This process could go on for some time perhaps even centuries. I would not want to predict but the field of biology and developmental psychology offers a useful metaphor for an overall description of the historical process and the growth patterns thusfar and into the future.

The growth of insects offers another useful metaphor or paradigm. Insects possess exoskeletons, that is, exterior skeletons. Continuous growth of the insect cannot occur until this outside skeleton, this outside layer, has been shed. This process is called moulting and after the moulting phase growth can continue. This moulting of the skin allows body mass to increase. The Bahá'í religion has begun its moulting phase, to draw on this insect analogy, in the context of this new paradigm of learning and growth. Indeed, we could play with this metaphor in many ways. We could see the Heroic Age as the exoskeleton and the prelude to mass conversion as the moulting phase with that mass conversion as the real, the massive growth in the Formative Age. I leave further metaphorical interpretations to readers.

The study of the cultures of plants, of the evolution of animal and human life and their vast ranges of species provides still other interesting metaphorical contexts in which to throw metaphorical lights on the growth of the Bahá'í Faith. I could make more than a few comments about plants, animals and man and their several developments. I will let readers make their own comparisons and contrasts between the growth of the Faith and the growth and development of other life forms. But I will make two or three observations: plants, require different amounts of light each day in order to grow. The amount of time that a plant requires is called the critical period. Some plants require more than 14 hours of light and without this amount of light on a regular basis their stalks become etiolated, yellow in colour, and the leaves of the plant will fail to grow to their potential. This is partly because there is not enough light available for photosynthesis, cellular processes and growth.

The latitude of where a plant exists also has great bearing on how they will cope in their environment because, for instance, in the extreme latitudes, there is not sunlight for 6 months, and the following six months their is constant light. Seasons also play a part and, taking both seasons and latitude into account, it is evident why different climates make homes for different varieties of plants. Plants have a balancing act between flowering, growing and producing energy for the mass already present on the plant. Several chemicals play their part internally while reacting to the outside environment. All these reactions originate from one thing, the genetic coding that made the plant operate the way it does. I could write much more here about plant life. The metaphorical nature of physical reality gives us as human beings whole worlds in which to view this growth and learning process. Indeed, the very literature and history of this Cause gives us mirrors in which we can see our own lives. We become, as it were, spectators of our own life; we are given many larger visions in which our life is contained and through which we can interpret the reality of our lives. The entire history of this Cause is one immense metaphorical landscape in which we can view our lives.

Often we are blind to the truth of our holy writings because we read them "with" rather than "through" our eyes; as a result, their "visionary" spirit turns into the dead letter of history and dogma. Fundamentalism and its accompanying rigidity of attitude, narrowness and intolerance of differing points of view, enters our worlds. Fundamentalism has more in common with a certain mental attitude than it has with religious belief itself. What should enlarge, instead terrorizes and enslaves with judgementalism and moralizing. Instead of sin-covering eyes we are only too conscious of the faults and failings of others. Ordinary Bahais often become divorced from the creative Word; what should be spiritual attitudes become religious habits. This is not to say that the habituation of various practices like prayer and fasting are bad things. Far from it.

Questions are not signs of doubt and answers signs of certitude. Just by being members of this Faith does not give us all the answers to the imponderable, immensely complex questions of our age. It is naive, simplistic and somewhat arrogant to twitter away that we have all the answers. We are not a catechistic Faith. There is no assumption, as a catechism requires, of set answers, of questions tailored towards a specific doctrinal response. Teaching and learning by rote and its dominant repetitive element is antithetical to the spirit of independent investigation. Variety and diversity not repetition and dogmatism is at the core of this new paradigm. At least that is the emphasis I would give it. At the same time,repetition and a certain catechistic attitude has its place and this is evident all around us in the Bahai world: 95 Allauabhas every day, 19 nineteen day feasts, a calendar of events that give the Bahais celebrations and commemorations month in and month out year after year, an emphasis on memorizing the writings, inter alia. But, again, we must be on our guard that our Feasts do not become more like restrained church services and our LSA meetings predictable business meetings dealing with routines and the details of organizing eventsand activities. Discussions often are better when they are untidy and when one person does not rule the roost, so to speak.

I leave it to readers to follow-up on the fascinating juxtapositions and the endless metaphors we can discover between various forms of life, their workings, their development and their several evolutions in this new Cause. The habit of analogical thought is important to develop if one is to see the metaphorical nature of physical reality in all its forms--and especially in the Bahai writings. Through the juxtapositions which emerge, for me at least, I am helped to explain and to illuminate the varied developments and evolution of the history of this 165 year old religion and its future in the centuries to come. John Hatcher has developed this theme in a book in which he tries to answer the question: "Why do spiritual beings-human souls-begin their lives in the physical world?"

According to Hatcher the world is a classroom designed by God to instigate and nurture mental and spiritual growth. His book The Purpose of Physical Reality examines the components of this classroom to show how everyday experience leads to spiritual insight. Viewing life in this way, we can learn to appreciate the overall justice of God's plan and the subtle interplay between human free will and divine assistance in unleashing human potential. The idea of physical reality as a divine teaching device not only prepares us for further progress in the life beyond, it also provides practical advice about how to attain spiritual and intellectual understanding while we are living on earth. I leave it to readers, as I say, to investigate its implications for this new culture of learning and growth, this new paradigm and this paradigm of physical reality within the paradigm of learning and growth.

MORE COMMENTS AND YET MORE COMMENTS ON THIS NEW PARADIGM

The new culture of learning and the training institutes with their increased and more regular socializing, with their emphasis on memorizing, on accompanying service activities, on learning methods that compliment individual learning and that are especially useful for new Bahá’ís has begun to generate, to be productive, as I say, of a significant rise in enrolments. But, as I also said above, this is not true everywhere. The present focus is on building up the numbers in the A-clusters where there are already a significant number of Bahais. The B,C and D clusters, indeed most of the clusters on the planet are not the focus at the present stage of the current Five Year Plan(2006-2011). I would venture to suggest that in at least half the localities, some 60,000, significant growth is not being achieved. This is partly due to the present Plan's focus on A-clusters. This picture is, in all likelihood, true in most of the 16,000 clusters into which the planet has now been sketched or organized. As Paul Lample notes Bahais only exist in some 6000 of these 16,000 clusters as of 2009. Perhaps by the end of 2016 the community may open another 2000. Time will tell.

My guess is that in at least 60,000 of the 120,000 localities on the planet where Bahais now reside no growth or very limited growth has been achieved or will be achieved in the first two decades of this new paradigm(1996-2016). But this is a guesstimation at best. But, more significantly from my perspective, there is now a framework for action, a framework that is much more detailed, systematic and energized than in the more than four decades of my association with the Bahai Faith from 1953 to 1996. Of course, within this context, many of the requirements for believers are much the same as they have always been: prayer and fasting, attendance at Feast and holy days, systematic study of the Creative Word and engagement with society, inter alia.

Everyone can find some part to play, though, as I have already pointed out, in the multifaceted requirements of this new paradigm no matter what cluster in which they live. In the clusters in which Bahais now live and have their being the diversity of activities and the simplicity of many of these activities is beyond the scope of this not-so-brief article. This is true right across the range of cluster groupings from A to D. My own son Daniel is now working as a support secretary in the International Teaching Centre as a statistical analyst, the second person to have this role in the context of this new paradigm; I look forward to further conversations with him on some of these statistical matters, matters which have always been with the Bahai community as long as I have been associated with it--more than half a century.

The renewed emphasis on the process of entry by troops and the concomitant and associated “united clarity of vision for the expansion of the Cause and all its agencies,” was and is, as I say, part and parcel of this recent paradigmatic shift. It was ushered in by “the developments in the remarkably dynamic period” of the Six Year Plan of 1986 to 1992 and “the accumulated potential for further progress” which was considered “incalculable at the time;” as well as the view that “some mysterious rampant force” was resulting in a quality of change in the world which the House of Justice referred to as characterized by suddenness or “precipitateness.” The rigorous effects of this rampant force were like “a quickening wind” which was “ventilating the modes of thought of us all” and “renewing, clarifying and amplifying our perspectives.” It is against this background, this socio-historical context, that this new culture of learning found its original articulation in the mid-to-late 1990s.

This ventilation, this quickening wind, it seems to me in retrospect, resulted among other things in: (a) the new focus of the Four Year Plan of 1996 to 2000, “a turning point of epochal magnitude,” and (b) a series of documents that tried to summarize “the experience of the Baha’i world in advancing the process of entry by troops. These documents, in addition to many letters beginning with a series of three letters in January 2001: “to the Conference of the Continental Board of Counsellors,” “to the Conference marking the inauguration of the International Teaching Centre Building” and “to the Baha’is of the World,” laid out in some detail the nature and meaning of this culture of learning, this culture of growth and this paradigm shift. And there was much else. Part of the problem of coming to grips with the realities of this new paradigm for the ordinary, the average, the typical, Bahai--if there is such a person--is the plethora of print that is now available on this culture of change: 15 years worth now(1996-2011) of letters, papers, blog sites, messages, analyses, reports, inter alia.

These letters and these documents noted that, among other things: the scheme could not be applied in every situation; we stood too close to comprehend the magnitude of what was so amazingly being accomplished; a coherence of understanding, a change of time, a new state of mind and immensely promising prospects were developing within the divinely driven enterprize with which we were occupied; an unprecedented project, a fundamental change of consciousness was taking place; and that the future had never looked so bright.” But such a view, such a prospect, such an attitude, required of many, especially those believers who had seen few to no enrolments for decades, what had been required all their Bahai lives, wisdom and the power of understanding, often a short commodity at the best of times, these new and wonderful configurations, these dazzling rays of a heavenly power to chose but two of the many phrases Abdul-Baha uses for intellect and wisdom, the two most luminous lights in either this world or the next. The process whereby both the suspected and unsuspected benefits of this new Cause have been manifested to the eyes of men has been slow, painfully slow. This has been true for more than a century and a half. Crises which this Faith has faced and which its believers have had to deal with have at times threatened to arrest the unfoldment of this Cause and blast the hopes which its former progress has engendered. It is, therefore, not surprising that disappointment sometimes sets in and the apparently slowly crystallizing institutions and its policies are often barely understood.

THIS NEW PARADIGM: STILL GETTING OFF THE GROUND AND CRYSTALIZATION

By 2011, a decade and a half after the inception of this new paradigm, this culture of growth and learning: (i) had “crystallized into a framework for action,” (ii) resulted in the friends engaging in “progressively more complex and demanding acts of service,” (iii) saw “a steady increase in the exercise of individual initiative,” (iv) was characterized by the believers “entering into closer association with people of many walks of life,” (v) was marked by “a graceful integration of the arts into diverse activities,” (vi) issued in a rigorous process of community learning that was a hallmark of its community development, (vii) possessed a flexibility that “discouraged the tendency to confuse focus with uniformity or exclusivity” and (viii) saw this new process as the outcome of yet another stage in “the silent growth of that orderly world polity whose fabric” the Baha’is themselves were weaving.

But more importantly, and with a necessary emphasis, it must be stated that all these developments did not occur everywhere and to the same extent. Indeed, in some places, as is virtually always the case, things went backwards, or one step forward and two steps back. In a global organization with Bahais in 120,000 localities the picture is both difficult to summarize and, for most of us, impossible to integrate into some unified perspective in our brains occupied as they are with so much of quotidian and local reality. An international picture emerges and is updated with each major message from the BWC. The events outlined in these messages possess a complexity that staggers the imagination of the humble votaries of this Cause--that is you and I.

At Ridván 2006 the House cautioned the Baha’is not to be “misled by the painful slowness characterizing the unfoldment of the civilization” they were laboriously establishing. This cautionary note has been voiced on many occasions over the years by each of the Central Figures and Their legitimate successors. When “hoped-for results did not readily materialize” and “a measure of discouragement set in” it became necessary for believers to become aware that their “high expectations of the early years were.....quite unrealistic.” This problem of high expectations, of the flush of enthusiasm, of the lack of what might be termed emotional moderation and of unrealistic goals and aspirations is and has been “in no small measure responsible for the failure of the hopes” many so fondly cherish within the context of this new paradigm as well as the entire Baha’i paradigm right back to the days of the Báb. Discouragement, fatigue, frustration and disappointment are part of the Bahá'í experience; indeed, they are at the core of any person's life--with much else.

By 2011, though, statistics began to be included more extensivley in messages. This was partly due to the existence at the BWC of a statistics officer or analyst, a department devoted to the quantification, the numerical side of the Cause,a side which has always been important and which has been in the process of increasing efficiency over the last several decades. I won't enumerate all the numbers of tutors, study circles, believers engaged in this or that activity. Readers can easily find htis sort of data by simply reading the messages and rereading them since it is only in the study of all this burgeoning print that any individual believer can retain the information now existing in relation to this paradigm at the global level.

ENTRY-BY-TROOPS AND THE DAWNBREAKERS

Like the task of the Báb Himself back in the 1840s, as Shoghi Effendi pointed out in his epilogue to the Dawnbreakers, the task faced in the context of this new paradigm needs to be viewed as a process. In the long term, as the Baha’is have been told time and time again since the earliest days in the history of their Faith, the ascendancy of this process among the many processes in which the Cause is engaged, however severe the disappointments, is inevitable. However severe some crisis may be which threatens the unfoldment of the Cause making that unfoldment slow, painfully slow and which in the process of that unfoldment often blasts the hopes of some program and some of the hearts and minds of many participants, triumphs unsurpassed in the past will inevitably occur. I make this point occasionally in this long essay because it is a point that needs repeating, needs added emphasis by this very repetition. As the future comes at us year by year, triumphs unsurpassed in splendour are in store, down time’s long and not-so-long and stony and not-so-stony path. This process of alternating rhythms of decline and fall, victory and achievement, calamity and grace is itself a paradigm of process that characterizes so much of the activity of the Cause. Shoghi Effendi draws to our attention in that same Epilogue of The Dawnbreakers as he discusses the tragedies of the 1840s, tragedies in the growth of the Bab's new Cause, that it was the very enthusiasm of those first believers, in what could very well be seen as one of the first paradigmatic phases of Babi-Bahai experience, that was a major cause of their failures. We need to take warning more than a century and a half later. Often it is the enthusiasm of the believers, their very attachment to the Cause, that causes so many problems in commmunity life.

I have lived with the presence of the terms entry by troops and mass conversion as well as the notion of increased receptivity now for over half a century. Entry by troops has been occurring in one way or another, as I suggested above, since the 1840s and, I would argue, so too has been the increased receptivity we keep hearing, but about which we seem to have little understanding. Our understanding of the implications of this deceptively easy phrase which falls from our lips, of its long term role and of its fundamental importance to our community life in the last century and a half and in the decades to come--is crucial. Like so many terms and concepts, the word understanding has many layers of meaning. It is not my purpose here to dwell on the nuances of meaning of this term entry-by-troops, nor do I intend to outline the places where it has occurred and the variations as to its application and realization but, like so many things in the Cause, we all stand in need in this important epoch of transition of the “new and wonderful configurations” of knowledge and understanding, “the dazzling rays of this strange and heavenly power,” to embellish our minds with fresh insights derived from wisdom and the power of thought as applied to this important phrase: increased receptivity within which entry-by-troops has and will take place.

KEEPING RECORDS: MORE WORDS ON STATS

When my mother first went to a fireside in 1953 in Canada there were some 200 thousand Bahais on an assortment of lists and non-lists across the face of the Bahai community. Record keeping was not then what it is now--in the Bahai communities on the planet and 90 per cent of the Bahais then lived in Iran; now there are some six million adherents and 90 percent of them live outside Iran. The numbers have multiplied thirty times in those five decades. That is one statistical measure of receptivity. Examining the paradigm shift in the earlier years of my Bahai experience the years from, say, 1953/4 to 1973/4, could also provide for this work a useful context for discussing my life, my society and my religion--a triple focus. The size of the Bahai community went from some 200 thousand to a million during those years. Two Plans were completed and the apex of Bahai administration was first formed in the world's first global democratic election. But, again, I leave the discussion of that paradigm shift and its context in my life to my memoir.

DEALING WITH DISCOURAGEMENT

DISAPPOINTMENTS OF THE CENTRAL FIGURES OF THIS FAITH

Each of the Central Figures of this Faith Themselves faced disappointment, as I mentioned above, at the results of the teaching process, its slowness and the lack of receptivity of the human beings who heard its message. Bahaullah, Himself, has written that "had the ultimate destiny for God's Faith been in Mine hands, I would never have consented, even though for one moment, to manifest Myself unto you, nor would I have allowed one word to fall from My lips."(Gleanings, p.91) In the last years of Abdul-Bahas life, after His journey to the West and after the revelation of the Tablets of the Divine Plan, the years 1918 to 1921, were for Him years of disappointment. If one reads the new Commentary on the Tablet of the Holy Mariner, for example, by Jamsheed Samandari one can get a view of the intense disappointment Abdul-Baha experienced at: (a) the lack of response to His efforts to promote His Fathers Cause by His trip to the West in 1912 and 1913 and (b) the behaviour of the Bahais themselves. The Guardian's story is filled with disappointment. And so it is that, if you and I experience similar disappointments as this Cause unfolds within this new paradigm that is part of the process. It is a process which is built into our very history, the very history of our Faith going back to the 1840s, if not to the last years of the 18th century and the first steps taken by this Causes first precursor, Shaykh Ahmad.

Discouragement is an oft-experienced emotion by individuals both within the Cause and without. Indeed it is as common as air and has been since 1844. As this new paradigm was getting off the ground in the mid-1990s, there were many and diverse manifestations of discouragement. And there still are and I'm sure will be in the years and decades to come. On the one hand Bahais see and hear desperate and not-so-desperate exhortations to teach the Faith and this sense of urgency was and is often accompanied by an element of despondency or resentment. Often strong and faithful Bahá'ís have chosen to become inactive in the community on account of their perceptions of dysfunctionality and the gap between ideals and reality. Steadfast perseverance in the teaching work is not easy; it has never been easy; often individuals experience an inner hopelessness; this becomes a lack of expectation and then no effort at all.

There have been frequent manifestations of disunity as Bahá'ís saw the problem in the community and in the meagre response to teaching initiatives in the inabilities and misdeeds of their fellow believers. Skeptics and cynics often pointed to lofty ideals in Bahai exhortations like:"Let deeds not words be your adorning," and emphasized how these ideals just crumbled in the face of the realities of life. "Nobody lives up to their ideals, nobody," I have often heard it said. That's why in email discussions I was always a bit uncomfortable if the word "hypocrite" got thrown around. On some level all of us fit that description because none of us act entirely according to what we believe. So, I never thought it made much sense to point fingers. Just about the only way not to be a hypocrite would be not to have ideals in the first place. This would not be a good way to go. But it was these sort of perspectives that often coalesced into systematic critiques of the community in internet fora and academic publications. This was not true everywhere, but it was one of the many symptoms of discouragement and these symptoms and characteristics of dialogue were found in many Bahai localities, groups and LSA areas.

In 2002 the Universal House of Justice wrote to an individual believer who had expressed these sentiments of discouragement. The House pointed out that this description of the lack of significant numerical growth in Bahá'í communities in Western lands, while more precisely applicable to some countries than others, was largely accurate, and the resulting distress many Bahá'ís felt was fully justified. To see important Bahá'í communities markedly lacking in the development of the human resources required to reach populations desperately searching for solutions to the crisis in which society was sinking was painful indeed to believers aware of the potency of Bahá'u'lláh's Message.

SOME COMMENTS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF VIRTUE AND CRITICAL THOUGHT

As the Bahai community goes through the early decades of this new paradigm it will be important, as it has always been important, for members of the community to have, as I used to say as a teacher, their thinking caps on. Critical thought, as the House of Justice once put it(29/12/88), solid thinking, the attainment of correct perspectives, the adoption of proper attitudes, moderation in the expression of views among a host of other virtues, an awareness of the different latitudes from one mind to another, the evocation of a rarefied atmosphere of prayer and meditation in the context of courtesy, dignity and care, indeed, a profound change in the very standard of public discussion and a personal discipline necessary to successful consultation are absolutely critical within this new paradigm. Criticism has a baleful influence and yet, without critical thought and candour it is impossible to get to the truth. If dissidence is a moral and intellectual contradiction to those who would be unifiers of the children of men, then an etiquette of expression is called for. Indeed, it is one of the many sine qua nons of success.

Of course, all of this it could be said is nothing new. The Guardian gave emphasis of these same ideas with a special focus right at the start of his years in office. He wrote in 1923 in words I have already quoted but which deserve to be read twice: "Not by the force of numbers, not by the mere exposition of a set of new and noble principles, not by an organised campaign of teaching -- no matter how worldwide and elaborate in its character -- not even by the staunchness of our faith nor the exaltation of our enthusiasm, can we ultimately hope to vindicate in the eyes of a critical and skeptical age the supreme claim of the Abha Revelation. One thing and only one thing will unfailingly and alone secure the undoubted triumph of this sacred Cause, namely, the extent to which our own inner life and private character mirror forth in their manifold aspects the splendour of those eternal principles proclaimed by Bahaullah."

But we can't wait around until our inner lives achieve some lofty degree of perfection, a perfection far above our own individual and present existential morass of sin and heedlessness as Bahaullah informs us is our lifetime lot in that Long obligatory Prayer. We have to arise and struggle; that, too, is our lot on earth. As we arise and struggle we make our individual efforts to get our ship afloat, our plane off the ground, so to speak and play our part within this new paradigm.

DR IRVING JANIS AND GROUP-THINK

I would like to make some comments below drawing on some of the views of Dr. Irving Janis whose writings, it seems to me, offer some useful perspectives as the Bahai community goes about its work within this difficult and challenging process of learning and culture change in this new paradigm, a new paradigm that must deal, as the Faith has always had to do, with the human frailties, the idle fancies and vain imaginings that we all exhibit in our own individual ways.

Janis gives primary emphasis to what he calls Groupthink. Groupthink is a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analysing, and evaluating ideas. Individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking are lost in the pursuit of group cohesiveness. The advantages of seeing many choices and paths and achieving a reasonable balance within the framework of these many choices and thoughts are skewed by a decision-making process dominated by paradigm paralysis and various forms of groupthink. During groupthink, a term that has its origins as far back as the first years of the Ten Year Crusade, but popularized by Dr. Irving Janis in the 1970s and 1980s, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of current consensus thinking. A variety of motives for this development may exist such as a desire to avoid being seen as foolish or a desire to avoid embarrassing or angering other members of the group.

Groupthink may cause groups to make hasty, irrational decisions. Often individual doubts are set aside for fear of upsetting the group’s balance or other personalities. The term groupthink is generally used pejoratively. When groupthink operates in a decision-making process or in consultative settings it is not merely instinctive conformity at play which is, after all, a perennial failing, perhaps a necessary reality, of humankind. What is at play, what is happening in the group when groupthink is present, is a rationalized conformity—an open, articulate philosophy which holds that group values are not only expedient but right and good as well. Groupthink is a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.

To make groupthink testable, Irving Janis, perhaps the major writer and analyst in the last forty years to describe the processes involved , devised eight symptoms indicative of groupthink which are detrimental to the group and the achievement of a groups goals.

SYMPTOMS OF GROUP-THINK

These symptoms include the following:

1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
2. Rationalising warnings that might challenge the group's assumptions.
3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group consensus as people who are weak, evil, biased, spiteful, disfigured, impotent, stupid or one of a number of other qualities which stand in the way of group goals.
5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of "disloyalty".
6. Self-censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus. This is due to fear of others, fear of being able to speak out, fear of challenging other views, the absence of the clash of differing opinions when such opinions are needed for successful consultation.
7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
8. Mindguards: these are self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.

Groupthink results, Janis emphasized, from the symptoms listed above and it results in defective decision making. Consensus-driven decisions are the result of the following practices of groupthinking:

1. Incomplete survey of alternatives
2. Incomplete survey of objectives
3. Failure to examine risks of preferred choice
4. Failure to re-evaluate previously rejected alternatives
5. Poor information search
6. Selection bias in collecting information
7. Failure to work out contingency plans

WAYS TO PREVENT GROUP-THINK

Janis devised seven ways of preventing groupthink. They include:

1. Leaders should assign each member the role of “critical evaluator”. This allows each member to freely air objections and doubts.
2. Higher-ups should not express an opinion when assigning a task to a group.
3. The organization should set up several independent groups, working on the same problem.
4. All effective alternatives should be examined.
5. Each member should discuss the group's ideas with trusted people outside of the group.
6. The group should invite outside experts into meetings. Group members should be allowed to discuss with and question the outside experts.
7. At least one group member should be assigned the role of devil's advocate. This should be a different person for each meeting.

Janis’s probing and insightful analysis of historical decision-making has proved much more common, much more accurate in his findings, than originally thought. His analysis has often proved correct; the symptoms of groupthink are pervasive. The relationship to such symptoms and their outcomes include: the suppression of dissent, polarization of attitude and poor quality decisions. There is a high likelihood that symptoms of groupthink will develop when there is intense group cohesion, when a sense of crisis is present and when the group is insulated from criticism. As an alternative to Janis' model, other analysts have presented other models. One is known as "the strong ubiquity model" for groupthink. The strong ubiquity model represents more a revision of Janis’s model than a repudiation of it. The ubiquity model emphasizes strong group identification, the presence of salient norms and a sense of low self-efficacy in many of the members of the group. These factors are all necessary and sufficient, so goes the argument, to evoke groupthink reactions and defective decision processes.

The suppression of dissenting views, selective focus on shared viewpoints, polarization of attitude and action and heightened confidence in such polarized views are all factors preventing critical thought and resulting in poor decisions. Elevated confidence often evokes feelings of in-group moral superiority and invulnerability. I invite readers to follow-up on this brief summary I have provided here.

INCLUSIVITY NOT EXCLUSIVITY

I have referred above to Douglas Martin's 1992 talk and I will reiterate his comments here. This former director general of the Baha’i World Centre Office of Public Information emphasized that the Baha’i community had “not been able to escape a certain connotation of exclusivity.” Such a connotation, he went on to say, had inevitably arisen from the efforts of the Baha’i community in the teaching field and the Baha’i community’s consequent preoccupation with conversion and membership as well as the intrusion, like some necessary reflex action and its accompanying impulse, of an “us and them” mentality. The culture of learning, the paradigm shift, that the Baha’i community has been engaged in since the mid-1990s, and which had been initially intimated by Martin, among other intimations in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I have referred to above, involves a heroic effort to shed a number of previous and now quite inappropriate views in the Baha’i community. This shedding of old, now archaic views, it seems to me, is all part of this paradigm shift.

When I left the north of Australia, north of Capricorn, where I had been living, pioneering and travel-teaching from 1982 to 1987,after 25 years in the pioneering field(1962-1987), it had already become apparent to me that it was time for me to shed my own preoccupation with conversion and membership. This preoccupation had been part of my mental set, my pioneering mentality, my community orientation as far back as the 1950s. Along with it came a consequent intrusion like some necessary reflex action and accompanying emotional impulses of an “us and them” mentality. This was partly due to the fact that the first 25 years of my pioneering life(1962-1987) had been years of creative experimentation, necessary ones for the refinement of my own endeavour and the purification of my motives so that I would become "worthy of so great a trust," to draw on some of the expressions used in the publication Century of Light to describe and analyse the Bahai experience in the 20th century. By the 1990s I had already begun to orient my Bahai life without this strong conversionist spirit and ethos and I am sure I had lots of company in the Bahai international community.

This 25 year period from the 1960s to the 1980s had been one of "small inconspicuous beginnings" for this Cause. These beginnings widened and assumed "universal dimensions" in the next two decades, 1987-2007(Century of Life, p.111)and these universal dimensions are found described and scattered thoughout this book in ways which I trust readers will pick up without me having to point the way. Proving one is worthy of so precious a trust, the trust of faith or belief in this Cause, is an ongoing exercise, it seems to me. I seem to have had to prove this worthiness time and time again for half a century. This memoir is partly the story of that proving ground, my failures and successes. This attitude to Faith should come as no surprise to Bahai readers here since "living the life" and exemplifying the teachings is not about building-up credit points for the next life. There are no guarantees in this Faith as one finds in some sects, cults and religious groups about one's salvation. Religious zeal, however intense, does not guarantee a place among the angels or the seraphim in places beyond those proverbial pearly gates. This helps to keep the religious temperature cool and to counter the kinds of religious fanaticism that one finds in all too many places on this planet and which gives the name of religion the bad press that it has come to experience in our time among other previous times in history.

Martin also referred to “parochial” views, views clearly outmoded, counter-productive and militating against realistic and accurate images of the Cause in the public mind. These images must be reconfigured by public information programs in this new paradigm. By the time I came to write this book in the years 2007 to 2011 this reconfiguration was well underway. The several-decade long focus in the public image, the public message, the very ethos of the Baha’i Faith, which had tended to preoccupy the Baha’is with conversion in one way or another was slipping away at last. It is not the converting to a new religion that is now the emphasis in this paradigm but, rather, the process, the provision of means to unlock the secrets of the phenomenal world and bring about the Golden Age of humanity. And that process is and will be long and complex. Without the motivation of purpose to give meaning and usefulness to our experiences of life, hope and happiness remain elusive.

Just as the Guardian had summoned the Baha’is in the years between WW1 and WW2 to reject a view of the Cause as a movement, a fellowship and, even, as a religion in the familiar sense, so too are the Baha’is now being summoned to see the Faith they belong to in quite different terms than was the case in the first three decades after the election of the House of Justice in 1963 or as was the case in the first six decades of the implementation of the teaching Plans initiated in 1937(1937-1997). In virtually the entire lives of most of the Baha’is who are now members of the international Bahai community that unavoidable parochialism which had been part and parcel of the attitudes and values of the Bahais themselves was slipping slowly but surely into a theological and social dustbin. The very idea that the Bahai Faith once possessed a narrow parochialism seems surprising in some ways given the universalism and broad liberalism that is part of the very ethos of this Faith. These parochial views Martin said, several years before the emergence of this paradigm, must now be shed. During the first 15 years of this paradigm shift this shedding is becoming more and more apparent.

SHAHBAZ FATHEAZAM: GROWTH AND COMMUNITY IN BAHÁ’Í THOUGHT

For many of the ideas which follow I want to thank Shahbaz Fatheazam and his article Growth & Community in Bahai Thought: The Organismic Metaphor. Fatheazam informs us of a good example of this new inclusiveness and the integration of Bahai methods, teachings and values back in 1992. He describes the experience of some Japanese Bahá’ís in the extension of the Bahá’í system of elections into the wider secular society. "The Bahá’í system of elections is too good to be monopolized by the Bahá’ís...Municipal organizations and citizens’ groups in this city are experiencing terrible difficulties in electing their executive councils...These organizations are easily caught up in the worst forms of electioneering which split their members into opposing camps...We felt that the Bahá’í election system had much to offer our fellow citizens: no nominating, no electioneering, secret balloting, and valid ballots having to contain nine names." Various groups, such as the local Businessmen’s Union and a senior citizens organization, adopted the Bahá’í proposal and experimented with the idea. Aside from the one membership enrollment of an officer of the Union currently serving on the local assembly, the initiative has had the effect of discussing the Faith "very frankly with a large number of people...while avoiding the anti-religious prejudices which too often poison such exchanges... An unexpected by-product of this approach has been that a significant number of local politicians have been attracted to the Faith and some have sought to join the Faith."

There is a danger inherent in simplistic applications of this new paradigm and its normative guidelines for shaping practice. The style of thinking suggested by the organismic metaphor that is so frequently used by the Central Figures of this Faith shows that people are not mere resources to be developed, but rather human beings who are valued in themselves. They must be encouraged to choose and shape their own future. Human society is composed not of a mass of merely differentiated cells, but of associations of individuals, each one of whom is endowed with intelligence and will. Community growth and development in Bahá’í thought is not bound by the biological metaphor, but likened to it as a means of understanding the intricate values and processes that govern growth. A warning of following too rigidly the mechanical and/or chemical instructions passed on by the body that holds the component members together is given by Shoghi Effendi in the following: "To dissociate the administrative principles of the Cause from the purely spiritual and humanitarian teachings would be tantamount to a mutilation of the body of the Cause, a separation that can only result in the disentegration of its component parts, and the extinction of the Faith itself." (Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Bahá’u’lláh 5)

MORE ON INCLUSIVITY--GROWTH AND GLOBAL CIVILIZATION<

The key forms of Bahai community experience, of the labour involved in building Bahai institutions and communities in the decades of my Bahai experience from the 1950s through to the 1990s; indeed, the processes and activities of the Baha’i community throughout the 20th century surrounded: the 19 Day Feasts, Local Spiritual Assemblies and Bahá'í funds. Through these and others forms of Bahai activity the Ark of God was erected on Mount Carmel in the last years of that century. There was a beauty, a music, in the architectural edifaces on Mt. Carmel. As the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling once wrote:"Architecture in general is frozen music." I rather liked this clever play on words for there was a music at the Bahai World Centre for me as I went through the first 15 years of this new paradigm. It was a new music which had not been at the BWC in the years of the previous epochs and paradigms.

All of the above, the essential organizational framework and activity program that I had been engaged in constructing before 1996 was designed exclusively for Baha’is. The new key agencies, institutions and organisations Baha’is are now building within this new paradigm are not explicitly and exclusively for Baha’is only. “In every dispensation," Shoghi Effendi writes elsewhere, "there hath been the commandment of fellowship and love, but it was a commandment limited to the community of those in mutual agreement, not to the dissident foe. In this wondrous age, however, praised be God, the commandments of God are not delimited, not restricted to any one group of people, rather have all the friends been commanded to show forth fellowship and love, consideration and generosity and loving-kindness to every community on earth.”

The embrace of the other, those outside the Cause, is a long-standing Baha’í virtue in a general sense. The systematic and deep engagement of local Bahá'í communities with the world outside their borders of place and of identity, is, however, relatively new to a Bahá'í world that has spent the greater part of the last century concentrating on the accumulation of “individuals, families and institutions” within the banner of the Cause, and erecting and maintaining at great personal cost a basic infrastructure of thinly resourced administrative bodies: not having the luxury of looking very much outside. As this outward looking, inclusive focus deepens, the boundaries of Bahá'í identity soften, and what Bahá'ís call the "community of interest", become allies in this building of a new civilization amidst the current, evidently tottering one. It is thus not only Bahá'ís who are empowered by the new culture of Bahá'í community life to fashion the "systems, agencies and organizations" of a new civilization.

Viewed in some ways this new, global and embryonic civilization as well as this culture of learning and growth has been intertwined, enmeshed, interconnected with the Baha’i community since its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century. It has been slow in developing in some senses and in other senses it has developed in leaps and bounds. Viewed from different perspectives this growth and development has been “momentous” with prospects which are quite “dazzling.” This has been the case all of my Baha’i life wherever I have lived. At Ridván 2007 the House urged the Baha’i community “to open up avenues to guide souls to the Ocean of His Revelation” and such an urging, such a tone and style of writing, has been the case in many, if not most, of their statements over these past five decades since the “unique victory that the Cause won in 1963” when the fully legitimate institutionalization of that charismatic Force, what some sociologists call a routinization of charisma, a charisma of office as opposed to a prophetic charisma was completed. The potential significance of the labours of the present-day Baha’i community is and has been breathtaking. Baha’is are not merely building local Bahá'í communities now in clusters and localities, but they are building the basic units of a civilisation which Shoghi Effendi declares will constitute the “fairest fruit” of the revelation of Bahá'u'lláh, and signalise the advent of the promised “golden age”.

In a wider sense, as Shoghi Effendi wrote at the very start of what may also have been considered a previous paradigm shift in the 1940s: “The second century is destined to witness a tremendous deployment and a notable consolidation of the forces working towards the world-wide development of that Order, as well as the first stirrings of that World Order, of which the present Administrative System is at once the precursor, the nucleus and pattern---an Order which, as it slowly crystallizes and radiates its benign influence over the entire planet, will proclaim at once the coming of age of the whole human race, as well as the maturity of the Faith itself, the progenitor of that Order.”(Messages to America: 1932-46, pp. 96-7; letter 15-JUN-46, "God Given Mandate")

GETTING BOGGED-DOWN IN PROCEDURAL ISSUES

The Universal House of Justice expressed the view, as they were describing the operation of one of the key features of this new paradigm, the cluster, that these clusters should discuss the concepts of the culture of learning, of change and the paradigm shift in Baha’i community life. Consultations which take place in the periodic cluster meetings, meetings instituted at the very start of the Five Year Plan(2001-2006) and which are part of this new culture of growth and learning, should generate a “unity of thought about the growth of the Faith.......maintain a high level of enthusiasm and.....create a spirit of service and fellowship among those present.” “Such discussions,” they went on to say, in one of their many letters “should not become bogged down by undue concern for procedural issues, but should focus on what can be achieved and on the joy of witnessing the fruits of hard work and diligent effort. This is easy to say but, for many groups, difficult to achieve. I have watched this process of discussion now for decades and what the House of Justice refers to here had been a perennial and pervasive problem.

CASUISTRY

This tendency to get bogged down in casuistry, in definitions and meanings of terms, is an oft’-experienced problem both within and without the Baha’i community, both within academic circles and in a host of other interest groups. Undue concern for minute detail, for the machinery of administration and its channels and for the means, the instruments of the process and not the ends is a danger all-too-many fall into as they go about all sorts of activities within the Bahai Faith and this is no less true of this new paradigm of learning. I do not want to contribute to this endless discussion of terminological distinctions, this disease of words, this illness that strikes at the heart of many a consultation on a myriad of issues, but it is a problem that must be faced even if it is difficult to deal with and solve. We need to be on our guard to protect ourselves from the insidious affects of this casuistry on the consultative process and on our very understanding of quite fundamental issues in the Cause and, in particular, in relation to this new paradigm. There is a paralysis, as one writer points out, which originates in debates over the best method of teaching and arguments about the success or failure of particular initiatives.

We need to be on our guard, too, less the new emphasis on the institute process results in a limiting of other Baha’i activities and programs like: interfaith dialogue, deepenings, scholarship, firesides and the many possible individual initiatives. The individual believer, wrote the House of Justice,(17/2/04) "retains the inescapable duty to teach the Faith on his or her own initiative." There is much to be done; many avenues of activity and, to reiterate a point yet again, not everyone needs to be doing the same thing. Many of the activities in the Cause are tools not goals, instruments for the achievement of ends, not the aims and ends in themselves. Indeed the entire administrative apparatus is a means, at this stage of the growth and development of the Cause, is but a medium, an instrument for the prosecution of the teaching work. It has always been thus and so shall it always be thus, at least as far as most of our limited eyes can see in the first century or two of the Formative Age. So it has often been argued by people like Ali Nakhjavani(A Talk, 12/10/02).

PARTICIPATION--UNIVERSAL PARTICIPATION--EVERYONE FINDS THEIR OWN NICHE

It is natural that any given educational program, involving whatever resources and whatever format and wherever located, will not appeal to everyone and that some Baha’is will not wish to participate in that program. That has always been the case. Universal participation is and has been as elusive as its agreed on definition. The House of Justice has recognized this reality and the complexity of the concept. The very definition of universal participation and of the variety of available methods of learning, preferences for certain styles and approaches, have evolved with the years. The House has consequently advised that the believers not make their own evaluation and understanding of the new programs and emphases a cause for disunity. We all can chose our own method now and chose our own way of making a contribution to the ongoing needs of the Cause. Universal participation is, at least from my point of view, much more within the Bahai community's grasp, its reach, than it has ever been in the past.

“Participation”, the House went on to say in this context in a recent letter regarding the institute process, “is not a requirement for every Baha’i, who, in the final analysis” chooses “the manner in which he or she will serve the Faith. What is essential is that the institute process be supported even by those who do not wish to take part in it." "What is essential," they continued, "is that whatever the personal efforts of individuals to teach and in whatever ways they involve themselves in core and other activities that these individuals should possess a sense of mission, a sense of enthusiasm and the wisdom to know what to say and when to say it." Education and participation, like the nature of deepening, has many aspects and the House of Justice has often expatiated on these terms and their meanings, some might say ad nauseam, over their nearly fifty years at the apex of Bahai administration.

The print and electronic resources that have become available in the Bahai community, especially in the resource-rich western countries, in the years of this new paradigm have been exponential. the process of this vast development began before 1996, indeed, one can trace the development back to the opening message of the Seven year Plan in April 1979. Films, videos, CDs, a plethora of media productions that are ostensibly aimed at broader audiences, live performances, and web content—have high production values. Newsletters have burgeoned. Unlike other media productions, Bahai texts have been increased in both quantity and quality. They have been produced, not primarily to induce conversion but instead to strengthen the relationship between the believers and the community. The newsletters, of course,are insider documents to memorialize past triumphs and tribulations and also to provide information on present objectives and obstacles. These texts help readers to develop a collective identity or, to borrow political philosopher Benedict Anderson’s term for a group that forms a sense of unified purpose through self-recognition in print, an “imagined community.”

For many Bahais in the years of this new paradigm, part of their religious communicative tradition, especially in the third world, involves public displays of emotional, verbal, performances which often take place with great heights and depths of feeling, feelings that often invoke great spiritual intimacies. It is part of the essence of large groups activities and performances that they offer to the participants a special enhancement of experience, bringing with it a heightened intensity of communicative interaction which binds the audience to the performer and to each other in a way that is specific to performance as a mode of communication. Through these public performances, the performer elicits the participative attention and energy of his audience, and to the extent that they value his performance they will allow themselves to be caught up in it. When this happens, the performer gains a measure of prestige and control over the audience—prestige because of the demonstrated competence he has displayed, control because the determination of the flow of the interaction is in his hands. In this new paradigm there have been many conferences and public performances in which this process has taken place.

Perhaps the most obvious, significant, and defining characteristic of the approach to history in this new paradigm--and in paradigms before--is the way it ascribes divine purpose to all historical change. Bahais believe that God holds ultimate agency, nothing can occur in contradiction to God’s plan, and it is their responsibility to convey this message. This belief does not deny the importance of human reason and will; however, it assigns to human agency an auxiliary function: to apprehend, praise, and help realize God’s designs, which is by faith perfect and incorruptible. The Bahai community is a new evangelical community and writes its history as a form of witness, describing its expansion as the result of obedience to God’s instructions.

This evangelical, outwardly focussed, Bahai community that is caught up in this new paradigm believes that secular models for historical change erroneously focus on proximal, secondary causes and that the divine source of all change will become clear to non-believers in retrospect, either after conversion or the end of their lives. The prayers and the deeds of the believers, NOT the mayors or prime ministers or presidents or president’s men or any other political personalities, are the molders of history. This is because human events are only a reflection or projection of activities spawned, promoted, and propagated in the unseen worlds. The emerging authority in heaven and in earth belongs to the new Bahai institutions. Bahaullah has vested that authority in these new institutions. this view is central to this new paradigm.

Decisions about what an individual should do in the context of this new paradigm, though, must be made according to individual “circumstances and possibilities” and “the nature of the populations” with whom the Baha’is interact. And again, the House emphasizes that it is desirable that activities which “give expression to a diversity of talents become harmonized into one forward movement, and that the stagnation caused by endless debate over personal preferences about approach” be avoided. In this regard the House emphasized that it was “most noteworthy....that the spirit of initiative by believers” had come to extend over a very wide range of endeavours....But, again, it is only too obvious that not everyone, everywhere is going to exemplify that extension of the spirit of initiative. The Cause is, without doubt, capable of helping us all understand ourselves; indeed, this new paradigm is aimed at just this goal among other goals. But this does not mean that this increase in understanding will result for all believers, nor does it always mean an increase in the numbers of believers. This is, by now, only too clear, at least in the short term.

The Cause is often relegated to some obscure and largely ignored part of the lives of many Bahais. This is true in 2009 as it was true in 1849, 160 years ago at the very start of the Bahai Era. Not everyone will learn the required skills, acquire the necessary attitudes and apply the appropriate tools inspite of Bahaullahs command to immerse ourselves in the ocean of His words, inspite of the best of institute programs and the most saintly conduct of those implementing the Ruhi programs or, indeed, any other program. This is only a simple note of practical realism. We all must become pragmatists in todays world whatever our ideas and ideals or we set ourselves up for loss, a sense of disappointment and discouragement. Some things we can change, some we cant and we all need to have the wisdom to know the difference. Wisdom in this area is often in short supply.

The sense of misfortune and disappointment which more than forty years of teaching the Cause in many places in the West with little overt success may be diverted, assuaged or explained. But this is not always easily done and, when done, it does not always result in a new lease on life, renewed activity and heightened and more robust teaching initiatives. Such discouragement often requires more than the labour of thought and the inspiration of prayer and meditation. The riches of history and the arts, of philosophy and poetry, of biography and many of the social sciences and humanities when applied to an understanding and interpretation of these past decades can illumine the difficulties an individual or the Bahai community has faced during these years---indeed, during all of Bahai history and all of our own dear lives. Still, it is not surprising that many of the believers, myself included from time to time, have been worn down in the process. For others their wit was sharpened and their resolve quickened. At this climacteric in history, at this great turning point, at what may well be the greatest and most aweful period in the history of the planet, to chose a phrase from Edward Gibbon, it is not easy to make ones mark. These days will pass more quickly than the twinkling of an eye the House pointed out at Rivan 1999, in the month I retired from my career as a full-time teacher. Millions are ill-equipped to interpret the social commotion of our time; they sink deeper into a slough of despond as they listen to the pundits of error; they are easily entrapped and their visions are darkened. Bahais are not immune from the phantoms of a wrongly informed imagination at this portentious juncture in the history of the planet.

This Cause provides a bridge as sharp as a razor and it is suspended over the gates of the Placeless by the master hand of Providence. Many are called but few are chosen. This paradigm offers a call to the many, a challenge to the souls of men. One of the many bridges is to scientific perspectives like those represented by Fred Hoyle when he writes that: "Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves. Here we are in this wholly fantastic universe with scarcely a clue as to whether our existence has any real significance. No wonder then that many people feel the need for some belief that gives them a sense of security, and no wonder that they become very angry with people like me who say that this is illusory."(The Nature of the Universe) This fundamental skepticism is a pervasive one in the West as is its polar opposite, a religious fundamentalism. In these decades of this new paradigm the Bahais will be acting as a bridge between these two perspectives as well as other social and intellectual polarizations that exist in our global society.

Having a certain number of believers complete a sequence of Ruhi books is not a magic formula as the ITC pointed out in a letter to Continental Counsellors as early as 28 November 2004. It is an indicator that has to be viewed in the context of other propitious conditions as well as the success at outreach and teaching already achieved in the cluster. Doing the Ruhi books or responding to the call for more direct teaching must not be distorted, as some have noted, into trivialized notions that: (a) we are now all being called to go door to door or (b) we are all being asked to become parrots and give Anna's presentation anywhere and everywhere, or (c) the Ruhi books only apply in the third world. As the House pointed out in its Ridvan message of 2010 in relation to people who are first contacted as a result of direct teaching: "whether the first contact with newly found friends elicits an invitation for them to enrol in the Bahai community or to participate in one of its activities is not an overwhelming concern."

In a letter from the ITC wrote they wrote that in "C" and "B" clusters emphasis is generally placed on individual initiative. The role of the institutions is to encourage and facilitate the "spirit of enterprise" that results in an ever-growing number of core activities. As clusters develop, those individual initiatives often become systematized in collective endeavours like forming teaching teams or conducting invitation campaigns. This is beginning to happen in many B clusters on their way to becoming an A cluster. This has just happened in our cluster in northern Tasmania. In "A" clusters where intensive programs of growth(IPGs) are being launched, individual initiatives increase further while the role of institutional planning becomes more prominent in the overall design of the expansion and consolidation activities. Naturally the institute process, the multiplication of core activities, and the reflection meetings continue. The character of the reflection meetings evolves and the collaboration among the institutions intensifies. For more comments relevant here google: "Intensive programs of growth>Inspiration for Bahá'í Teaching."

In the months leading up to the December 2008 regional conferences the NSA of the USA reported that the bulk of service related directly to the Five Year Plan was being undertaken by a relatively small cadre of believers. The number of individuals deployed in the arena of action was not commensurate with the many thousands who had received at least some training through participation in institute courses. Of those who did engage in service, not all were able to sustain their activities. In addition, the number of new human resources being developed through the institute process was beginning to flatten. I refer to this development in the USA in 2008 but this is only one of the 200 countries in the Bahai world and in each country the picture is different. It is not possible in this book to present even a general outline and certainly not a detailed statement of what is happening across the Bahai world. For this reason I draw on messages form national, regional and local Bahai elected institutions as well as from many statements written by Bahais on the appointed side of Bahai administration. Many individuals are also commenting on this paradigm both on and off the internet and I draw on this burgeoning mass of people when it seems appropriate.

The 41 conferences around the Bahai world in January 2009 are a story in themselves. They brought to the process of growth a renewed vigor, as thousands of believers pledged specific services within the context of the Plan. The Regional Councils and Auxiliary Boards lost no time following them up with various initiatives and programs. It has now become clear, after more than two years since those historicl conferences, that in many clusters the resulting progress has been dramatic. The true success of the conferences, one NSA reported, must be measured not in weeks or months, but throughout the remainder of the Plan, a Plan which ended in April 2011. The best means of harnessing the energies created by these extraordinary events, these great conferences, is to cultivate a culture of accompaniment, whereby every believer receives loving and continuing encouragement in his or her path of service. In some places this is happening and in some places it is not. In an emerging world religion like the Bahai Faith the pattern and the picture across 200 countries and 6000 clusters is impossible to describe in a book of this nature. And I do not try.

GOOD OLD PETER KAHN

In a talk Peter Kahn gave in Toronto in August 2006, six years ago now and before his recent death in 2011, he commented off the cuff that “if you don’t want to participate in the core activities, it’s okay; you’re not being disobedient to the Cause. If your orientation is that you want to do proclamation work or write poetry and that’s all you want to do, God bless you." What Baha’is have to do is overcome the zealotry of people in the community who are really enthused about this new direction. We do not want to see those with the enthusiasm beat the drums, so to speak, to use these new forms of activity as a club to beat others with. It is important that all Bahais re-channel whatever penchant they have to pressure others into pressure on their own dear selves. In some ways these enthusiasms are natural and overly-zealous people have always been a test for the less zealous. In the process of exerting pressure on others such people turn encouragement into discouragement by laying what are often called colloquially-'guilt-trips'-on those who don't want to do what others are doing. It is not the intention of this new paradigm, this new institute process to divide the community into those who have done the Ruhi program and those who have not, to develop a hierarchy, an elite; it is not the intention that the Ruhi activities become a substitute for Baha’i community life or, indeed, provide a ladder to climb and thus attain some formal or informal form of leadership. Each of us is not responsible for the whole community and for what others do. We each are responsible for ourselves and for exercising our responsibilities in our own ways. Having others tell us how we should carry out these responsibilities doe not help. But, again, having others tell us what they think we should do also seems to be part of Bahá'í community life. It has been that way for me for nearly 60 years!

In yet another talk, this time on 3 July 2009, Peter Khan provided the Bahai community with a very useful analysis of the Ridvan 2009 House of Justice Message and, in the process, a commentary on the new Bahai culture. This talk can be googled and I recommend that talk as a logical inclusion or extension of this book. Much of what this wonderful teacher and administrator of the Cause said in that talk some two years ago is found in this book and much is not found here. Any bibliography on this new Bahai culture would include that talk and readers of this book should keep in mind that there is much that can be googled now if they want to learn about this paradigm.

The core activities, Peter pointed out in yet another talk, have a certain basic significance. The first is that they are a vehicle to avoid the dichotomy of the active leader with the passive congregation that follows him. That problem has never been solved in religious history. Every religion that we know about has either started off or, after a fairly short time, settled down into the active leader, who is on the edge of a nervous breakdown because he is so busy. With him has been the passive congregation that is expected just to sit there and do what it has been told. Bahá’u’lláh has broken that dichotomy down to create an active participating community of believers from which administrators are elected or appointed for limited periods. We have a lot of work to do to break down this tendency of Bahá’í communities to fall into that pattern of super-active individuals who either are exalted or who exalt themselves, and the passive remainder who do what they're told and try not to make too much trouble. We have to break that historic division down as our teachings tell us it is not the right pattern. We have a lot of work to do to absorb this new tendency into our very bones, to make this new form of action an integral part of our functioning; it will take generations to do that. Our core activities rest upon the fact that we do not have any leader or guru who tells us what the words mean. We must now rely on the power of personal initiative and/or group consultation and understanding in order to develop for ourselves a deeper vision of what the Creative Word is about.

The core activities are a means of training us in the vital aspects of Bahá’í life. As we participate in the core activities we realize that what we are doing is paying homage to the concept that humans need spiritual food as well as material food. We are underlining the supremacy of the Creative Word for understanding and devotion. By the very act of our participating in core activities, we are affirming that the Creative Word is supreme. We are recognizing the legitimacy of individual understanding. If the study circle goes well, each individual opinion is given a legitimate degree of respect. We don’t have people saying, “Oh, that’s stupid. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” or anything like that. We emphasize the legitimacy of the sincere expression of personal understanding. Through the mechanics of the operation of the core activities we don’t have authoritative individuals who acquire a following; people don’t hang on every word and say, “Well, I believe that to be true because I heard something he said and therefore it must be right.” We don’t have any of that. Rather, the Word is the authority. It gives us experience in consultation and in forming a sense of community in the study circle, which is generalizable then to the broader community.

Probably most important of all, the core activities are designed to inculcate in us a culture of learning. That culture of learning is fundamental to our religion because we are a religion of change. The central body of our Cause, the Universal House of Justice, is an institution committed to change, charged with the duty of change by virtue of the statements in the Will and Testament of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, so intrinsically we are a religion of dynamic change rather than seeking a static ideal condition. That philosophy of change permeates all aspects of our religion, and change implies an attitude of learning. If you believe you are learning, then you are committed to continually changing and improving and developing, which is fundamental to our religion.

As the House of Justice emphasized two years after what might be said to be the earliest mention of this emerging paradigm in the Ridvan message of 1988: "each person cannot do everything and all persons cannot do the same thing." The Bahai community has been forced, slowly but surely, to accept this reality in the last two decades. But this sign of maturity in accepting that many will not be taking part in what I take part in; indeed, many not only do not want to take part in what I do, they often do not have the talent to do what I do and vice versa: to each their own.

In the late 1980s and in the years leading up to 1996 the notion of a paradigmatic shift, of the vocabulary of a Bahai paradigm became more frequent. The fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989, in the year following the first mention of the term paradigm in a Ridvan message from the House of Justice, was symbolic of what was arguably the major paradigm shift in the socio-politcal landscape in our post-WW2 age. In 1995 the English translation of Udo Schaefer's book: Beyond the Clash of Religions: The Emergence of a New Paradigm was published by Zero Palm Press in Prague. Organizations and disciplines in the social and behavioural sciences as well as the physical and biological sciences began to use the term "paradigm" much more frequently than the term had been used in the 1980s; indeed, in the years since the term was first coined, so to speak, by Thomas Kuhn in 1962, the term was increasingly used. In some ways, the time was right for the Bahai community to bring the term into its organizational vocabulary.

The structure of LSAs, Groups and localities, committees, councils, feasts, holy days, inter alia remains in place and is still at the heart of the Baha’i community. This paradigm shift is intended to enrich the overall expression and diversity of Baha’i community life not replace what has been at the centre of community life for decades. The guiding philosophy of this new paradigm has sometimes been expressed as an integration of service activities with focused study of the Baha’i writings around a central core. “This system allows for the almost infinite development by various user communities of branching sub-sets that serve particular needs.”

In these early days, in what is now the early years of the second decade of the implementation of this new paradigm, this new process, this new system is still developing and its rich potential for diversity of expression has yet to fully reveal itself. Some local spiritual assemblies have felt that they were on the sidelines in this new paradigm. In some clusters and regional areas there has been tension between LSAs and ATCs. This is not surprising given the extensive organizational and administrative shifts that have been part and parcel of the overall paradigm shift. LSAs still have a central role to play. this hardly needs to be said. One only needs to reread some of the essential, the core, literature on LSAs to understand this. Along with the assemblies’ distinct administrative functions, what has been added is the responsibility to channel the community’s human resources into needed areas and to become more of a loving parent to the community, instead of a carpenter directing the human resources of the community as if they are inanimate objects, as one noted Bahai writer put it recently.

Spiritual development from a Bahai perspective has always involved, always meant interaction with others. The Bahai Faith has often been called 'the social religion' since the assumption is made, indeed is repeated in the literature of its Central Figures, over and over, that human development involves a growing awareness of the collective or social self. Spiritual progress is seen as almost entirely theoretical until learned and practised in a social milieu and this assumption is put into yet another context in this new paradigm. And we each have to decade to what extent we can engage in this social milieux. To each their own. In this new paradgim, it can not be stressed too often, there is a place for every temperament, every person no matter what his or her index of social enthusiasms and preferences, desire for solitude--indeed, whatever their style of life.

OTHER DEVELOPMENTS IN THE CAUSE OFTEN NOT GIVEN EMPHASIS

There has been much happening across the Bahai world since the middle years of that fin de siecle decade of the twentieth century when this new paradigm was being launched. Much that has happened needs to be acknowledged as we all come to focus on the new paradigm because there is much that has not been part of the explicit framework of this paradigm. And again, much of these new activities have not occurred ex nihilo.

In 1948 the Bahai International Community registered with the UN as an international non-governmental organization (NGO) and in 1970 was granted consultative status (now called "special" consultative status) with the UN Economic and Social Council(ECOSOC). Consultative status with the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) followed in 1976, and with the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in 1989. Working relations with the World Health Organization (WHO) were also established in 1989. Over the years, the Community has worked closely with the UN Environment Program (UNEP), the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the UN Development Program(UNDP).

The Bahai International Community has offices at the United Nations in New York and Geneva and representations to United Nations regional commissions and other offices in Addis Ababa, Bangkok, Nairobi, Rome, Santiago, and Vienna. In recent years an Office of the Environment and an Office for the Advancement of Women were established as part of its United Nations Office.

An Office of Public Information, based at the Bahai World Centre in Haifa and with a branch in Paris, disseminates information about the Bahai Faith around the world and publishes a quarterly newsletter, ONE COUNTRY. Distributed in English, French, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and German to readers in over 170 countries, ONE COUNTRY covers social and economic development projects, relations with the United Nations system, and global issues of interest to decision makers.

In the years before this new paradigm was initiated there had been decades of Bahai work at the United Nations. In September 1994 a document entitled "Comments on the Draft Declaration and Draft Programme of Action for Social Development (A/CONF.166/PC/L.13)" was presented at the second session of the Preparatory Committee for the World Summit for Social Development in New York, U.S.A. This is noteworthy in light of the new paradigm that emerged in the Bahai community only two years later. This new paradigm did not emerge ex nihilo or without a wider context in the international and multi-cultural world that is our emerging planetary civilization.
The dominant model of development in mostplaces on the planet depends on a society of vigorous consumers of material goods. In such a model, endlessly rising levels of consumption are cast as indicators of progress and prosperity. This preoccupation with the production and accumulation of material objects and comforts, as sources of meaning, happiness and social acceptance, has consolidated itself in the structures of power and information to the exclusion of competing voices and paradigms. The unfettered cultivation of needs and wants has led to a system fully dependent on excessive consumption for a privileged few, while reinforcing exclusion, poverty and inequality, for the majority. Each successive global crisis—be it climate, energy, food, water, disease, financial collapse—has revealed new dimensions of the exploitation and oppression inherent in the current patterns of consumption and production. Stark are the contrasts between the consumption of luxuries and the cost of provision of basic needs: basic education for all would cost $10 billion; yet $82 billion is spent annually on cigarettes in the United States alone. The eradication of world hunger would cost $30 billion[viii]; water and sanitation—$10 billion. By comparison, the world’s military budget rose to $1.55 trillion in 2008.(See the May 2010 statement of the Bahai International Community for more on this subject.

From a Bahai perspective a paradigm of development that seeks to promote global prosperity must take into account both the spiritual and material natures of the individual and society, while responding to the increasing interdependence of the peoples and nations of the planet. The Bahá'í¬ Writings anticipate the emergence of a new development paradigm as the regions of the world "unite to give each other what is lacking. This union," we are assured, "will bring about a true civilization, where the spiritual is expressed and carried out in the material." The Bahá'í¬ International Community believes that the Declaration and Programme of Action can contribute significantly to true social development for the 21st century if they address both the material and the spiritual needs and aspirations of the people of the world.

I will list below but a few of the developments at the international level since the beginning of this new paradigm but not explicitly part of its new culture of learning and growth. These developments are not part of the advances in childrens classes, junior youth programs, external affairs activities as well as the institutions of the LSA, the NSA and both the elected and appointed arms of Bahai administration operating as they do at the local, national and global levels all of which extended their scope and depth during the first fifteen years of this new paradigm. To outline all of these developments would lead to an even greater prolixity than has already come to characterize this book.

In 1997, for example, the Bahai International Community(BIC)launched the Human Rights Education Initiative with over 100 national affiliates worldwide to support the UN Decade for Human Rights Education. In 1998 the BIC participated in the World Bank’s World Faiths and Development Dialogue and released a major statement titled, Valuing Spirituality in Development: Initial Considerations Regarding the Creation of Spiritually-Based Indicators for Development. That same year the BIC participated in the World Conference on Human Settlements-Habitat II-in Istanbul, Turkey; the Turkish Bahá'í community sponsored a campaign to promote the concept of world citizenship. The BIC addressed the conference plenary with the statement Sustainable Communities in an Integrating World. The BIC also assisted with the establishment of over 30 national Bahá'í offices and committees to promote the advancement of women.

In 1999 the BIC participated in the third Session of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2000 the Bahá'í International Community representative, Mr. Techeste Ahderom, served as co-chair of the NGO Millennium Forum and addressed the Millennium Summit on behalf of the NGO community.

In 2001 the BIC representative addressed the International Consultative Conference on School Education in relation with Freedom of Religion and Belief, Tolerance, and Non-Discrimination in Madrid. The BIC also published One Same Substance: Building a Global Culture of Racial Unity for distribution at the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa.

In 2003 the BIC cosponsored the regional conference in India on “Education: The Right of Every Girl and Boy,” with UNICEF, UNESCO, and major international non-governmental organizations. And in 2004 the BIC chaired the NGO Committee on the Status of Women and facilitates the participation of over 2,500 NGO representatives at the Commission on the Status of Women.

In 2005 the BIC Representative addressed the Conference on Gender Mainstreaming and the Millennium Development Goals co-sponsored by the Pakistani Prime Minister’s office and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Ms. Bani Dugal, Principal Representative to the UN, spoke at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on panels dealing with global governance, gender equality, and values in leadership. The BIC issued a statement on the right to freedom of religion or belief titled, Freedom to Believe in response to the 2004 United Nations Development Programme Human Development Report titled, “Cultural Liberty in Today’s Diverse World.” The statement served as the catalyst for a BIC-hosted Symposium with His Excellency Piet de Klerk, Ambassador at Large for Human Rights at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ms. Asma Jahangir, UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief and Ms. Felice Gaer, Director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights.

In the years 2006 to 2010 the BIC continued to build on more than half a century of work at the United Nations. In May 2010 the BIC contributed the following paper to the 18th Session of the United Nations on Sustainable Development: "Rethinking Prosperity: Forging Alternatives to a Culture of Consumerism." Serious readers of the work of the Bahá'í International Community United Nations Office should google that site and examine the many reports, statements, papers and an assortment of presentations to many conferences at the UN level. The new culture of learning and growth is a multi-faceted paradigm with Bahais working in a range of activities not highly or especially specific to the overall structure of this new pattern in Bahai community life.

For the last 15 years the worldwide Bahá'í community has been endeavoring systematically to effect a transformation among individuals and communities around the world—to inspire and build the capacity for service. The framework for action guiding these activities has been rooted in a dynamic of learning—characterized by action, reflection, and consultation. In thousands of communities, Bahá'ís have set into motion neighborhood-level processes that seek to empower individuals of all ages to recognize and develop their spiritual capacities and to channel their collective energies towards the betterment of their communities. Aware of the aspirations of the children of the world and their need for spiritual education, they have started children’s classes that focus on laying the foundations of a noble and upright character. For youth aged 11-14, they have created a learning environment which helps them to form their moral identity at this critical time in their life and to develop skills which empower them to channel their constructive and creative energies toward the betterment of their communities. All are invited to take part in small groups of participatory learning around core concepts and themes which encourage individuals to become agents of change in their communities within a dynamic of learning and an orientation towards service. Of course, this is not happening in all the 120,000 localities where Bahais reside, but in some 1500 communities a solid start has been made.

There are also a range of what you might call developments in the creative and performing arts. If I was interested in compiling the information and doing the research on the developments in the arts in the Bahai community in the last 15 years a separate book would have to be written. Film is a lot like the Baha’i Faith. Film brings together all the art forms. The Bahai Faith brings together all the peoples and religions of the world. The two combine well and Mithaq Kazimi, a young Bahai filmmaker and native of Afghanistan, founded the Dawn Breakers International Film Festival(DBIFF). DBIFF debuted in December 2008 at the 24th annual Grand Canyon Baha’i Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. The public was invited to attend and some 600 people from around the country participated in this two day event. In the coming year, DBIFF plans to take its films on the road to several cities in the United States and abroad. Bahais are also making films in the wider culture. A full-length feature film, entitled "Serenades," was written and directed by Mojgan Khadem, an Iranian-born Bahai from Adelaide, South Australia. The film received a glowing review ahead of its release in an industry publication, Screen International, where critic Frank Hatherley described it as an international gem. And there is much more, too much to include here.

The first significant success of the stand-up comedy career of Omid Djalili was at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe was on the eve of this new paradigm in 1995 with "Short, Fat Kebab Shop Owner's Son", followed by "The Arab and the Jew" in 1996. In his act he claimed to be the only Iranian comedian which, he said, was "three more than Germany". His stand-up routines and jokes focus primarily on multiculturalism and ethnic peculiarities. His hyperactive and energetic manner of imitating accents, undercutting political humour with absurd bellydances and singing has earned him a significant worldwide following. Readers who would like to follow his career in the years of this paradigm shift can get a telescopic view at Wikipedia. There are other famous Bahais, celebrities, people of renown from various fields and other outside this Cause who have written statements of high praise endorsing this new Faith and its teachings which I do not want to dwell on here. If readers google the words "famous Bahais" they can get a list going back to the earliest years of Bahai history and all the previous paradigms.

There is so much happening in the print and electronic media: Bahais on TV, on the radio, being interviewed in magazines, in journals, writing in magazines and journals. Since 1996 there has been a veritable explosion of Bahai activity across the creative and performing arts in addition to what I have mentioned above. Just google a few relevant terms/words and you will be more than a little surprised. Of course, many of these developments come outside the explicit scope of the new paradigm. But there is clearly a new wind blowing as it was often said of the Cause back in the 1960s in the West.

As the Bahá’í community has grown in the decades since I joined back in the 1950s, I have seen many experts from numerous fields become Bahá’ís. I have also seen Bahá’ís becoming experts. As these experts have brought their knowledge and skill to the service of the community and, even more, as they have contributed to their various disciplines by bringing to bear upon them the light of the Divine Teachings, problem after problem has been illumined. This aspect of the growth of the Cause is often not given the emphasis that it deserves, in part, due to the tendency of Bahais not to blow their own horn, so to speak. The problems now disrupting society in the decades ahead will be answered from the perspectives of the Cause. The process often seems too slow for our instant coffee, instant and immediate gratification society. But in the last 50 years I have been amazed at this development within the Faith. In this new paradigm this development that I have observed in the last half century will continue to characterize the Bahai experience to an even greater degree; I have little doubt. But, as I say, the processes are complex and mysterious and everything in its own season.

Not all is in the hands of experts, though. The approach to curriculum development in 1000s of Bahai communities for many of the activities in Bahai life has been one of both design as well as field testing and evaluation. The first step, often, in the writing of any set of materials has been taken when experience emerges from grassroots action in response to particular development needs. Curriculum materials are continually refined in light of new knowledge and insights. The cultural shifts taking place are evident in the greater capacity to carry out collective action, to see oneself as an agent of change in the community, as a humble learner, as an active participant in the generation, diffusion and application of knowledge. The continuous cycle of learning through action, reflection and consultation has raised awareness of the needs and resources across communities as well as strengthened the mechanisms for collective action and deliberation. Again, as I say, this is not happening everywhere in the immensely diverse tapestry of the international Bahai community with some 17,000 elected bodies and, as I say above, 120,000 localities where Bahais reside.

When a Bahá'í community is very small, and of the 16,000 clusters in which the world-wide Bahai community is divided, most of them are so small that much of the new paradigm can not be put in place, in action. There is just not the men-on-the-ground, so to speak. But the pattern exists and as expansion takes place, the pattern is simply--or not-so-simply replicated. The Bahai community I live in with its four Bahais is an example of one of the infinite number of experiments in Bahai commuity life. There is little that we can do to implement the social teachings of the Faith beyond their impact on the behavior of the four individual believers. Such a community like my own with the resources in funds and manpower at its disposal is but a drop in the ocean in comparison with the many large agencies, governmental and private, which are engaged in social improvement. When the Bahá'í community grows sufficiently large, however, its activities can, must and do proliferate and diversify.

This development is already taking place in many parts of the world. In India, for example, the New Era School in Panchgani, which has been developing remarkably for a number of years, is closely associated with a rural development project in the villages close by that is having dramatically favorable results in the life of the villagers. In the province of Madhya Pradesh, where there are hundreds of thousands of Bahá'ís, the Rabbani School in Gwalior is educating children from the villages of the area in the Teachings of the Faith, in academic subjects and in agriculture, so that when they return to their home villages, these pupils not only promote the Faith but will influence their growth and development in every way. In Ecuador the size of the Bahá'í community, scattered over inaccessible terrain in the high Andes, made it both necessary and possible some years ago to establish a Bahá'í radio station. "Radio Bahá'í," as it is known, broadcasts not only about the Faith, but has programs concerning health, agriculture, literacy and so on. It has now become so well established and highly regarded that it has been able to apply for and receive a Canadian Government grant through C.I.D.A. to finance the development of certain social service activities. Thus it can be seen that once the Bahá'í community attains a certain stature it is able to work in fruitful collaboration with non-Bahá'í agencies in its social activities.

DEEPENING PROGRAMS AND THE RUHI INSTITUTE: A COMMENT

I have seen many a formal deepening program since my first association with the Cause in the 1950s and I have drawn on just about every one of them that has been circulated in North America and Australia in the last several decades at least those in the West and in English. The Ruhi program, the Ruhi Institute, is only one of many new institute programs that I am confident will evolve in the decades head. Right now it is the major institute program out and about in the community. It is an indispensable engine that drives the new paradigm forward. But, more importantly in some ways, it is the enthusiasm, effectiveness and devotion, the wisdom and understanding, with which the teaching work is carried out, not so much the method. It is the capacity of individual believers to demonstrate those spiritual capacities and virtues in interaction that, in the end, obtains the quantitative results desired. For this paradigm is, if nothing else, a simple or not-so-simple extension of the workshop that is the Bahai community, a workshop for individual aspirants to human spiritualization to advance civilization itself.

Deepening programs have been around for decades, indeed, one could argue, for over a century and a half. But the institute process, centred as it is on a structure and on several roles, on the Ruhi Institute curriculum and on study circles, on boards and coordinators as well as on tutors and systematic training is a different ball-game, as they say, to the old deepening programs which still exist in many places especially small ones like the one I live in. After perhaps thirty to forty years of the use of the term 'institute,' and at least thirty years of the existence of the Ruhi Institute in different forms, the decision of many National Assemblies around the Bahai world to make Ruhi courses the core program of Training Institutes, yet another term that is part of this new paradigm and a term with its own timeline, has resulted, in just this last 15 years(1996-2010), in bringing the word 'institute' into a much sharper focus than was the case as far back as I can remember.

Jenabe Caldwell and others first used the term institute in the 1970s and by the early 1990s the story of the institute process within a Ruhi Institute framework could be read in a publication entitled: Learning About Growth: The Story of the Ruhi Institute and Large-scale Expansion of the Bahá'í Faith in Colombia (Riviera Beach: Palabra Publications, 1991). Jenabe Caldwells story in From Night to Knight(1995, New Delhi, India) is also the story of the transformation of one man from spiritual timidity into a great pioneer. This is a tangential aspect of the topic under discussion here, but I would like to add some thoughts on the subject of the pioneer before passing on to other aspects of this new paradigm. I make these remarks due to the important role that the pioneer has had in the first 15 years of this new paradigm and will have in the decades ahead.

In the American cultural mythology, the cowboy stands firm as a “unique” representation of America – her people, her spaces, her cultural belief that America is a land of “the essential American soul…an isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man."( See:Jennifer Moskowitz, "The Cultural Myth of the Cowboy, or,How the West Was Won," Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Spring 2006, Volume 5, Issue No.1) While the phrase is problematic, the figure of the cowboy offers a myth that seems to substantiate the ideology behind it which is certainly capitalist. In order to further capitalism as the dominant ideology, the country needed to cultivate an idealized self-image characterized by the individual, self-reliant, transient qualities of the western hero, no matter that upon further study the cowboy is not necessarily any of those things. The myth prevails and masks the violence of the West, class and racial unrest in America, and capitalism’s control over American culture.

William Bevis contends that capitalist democracy seems to many a natural yoking, and usually implies more, a modern industrial capitalist democracy wed to progress, as if economic liquidity were necessarily linked to political freedom, social mobility, and individualism.(ibid) Placing Bevis’ contention in the late nineteenth/turn of the century post-Civil War framework, then, undergirds the importance of the archetype of the western hero, an archetype which perseveres in contemporary American culture. America aspired to be unified, powerful, industrial, and capitalist, and Americans desired power and success. Therefore, if the western hero held the traits of individualism, self-reliance, and permanence, and if the future of the United States was to be finalized in the West, then Americans would revere the perceived capitalist tendencies of the western hero who managed to embody the desired image of nation for all Americans. Thus it is in the literature that the knight and the cowboy become romanticized archetypes furthering the dominant ideology through their hegemonic representations. And it is in western American literature that we paradoxically draw on and deny the medieval knight as we construct his mythsake, the uniquely American cowboy.

I make mention of this cowboy image because, it seems to me, that the pioneer image in the Bahai community has had and will have a similar function. I do not think that the image will become hegemonic, though; the role and importance of the pioneer has become softened in recent years. Still he or she is going to be an important feature of the Bahai cultural landscape and this new paradigm in the decades to come if the great spaces on the globe where there are no Bahais are to be filled up in cluster after cluster. Deep in the national mythos of the cultures in which I have lived: North America and Australia--is the glorified figure of the loner: the farmer, backwoodsman, cowboy, gold miner, or other adventurer who lives by wit and grit a step from the frontier, needing no organized religion or government to show him the way. In some ways the pioneer which I have now been for nearly fifty years partakes of some of this mythos. At the same time, though, the pioneer struggles as the decades of his or her experience lengthen to define themselves geographically, culturally and in a non-partisan political sense and, in so doing, to assert some communal identity. The Bahai ethos, its history and teachings are crucial in this regard. In the new culture of learning and growth the pioneer will both contribute to and be aided by the many programs and the inherent dynamics of this new paradigm in which his life is embedded.

The Bahai community, one of the lives within it like my own and all of the accompanying ideals and activities do not occur either naturally or by accident. They are framed by design when a writer like myself goes to put that design, that story, on paper with description and analysis. An international organization like the Bahai Faith requires some sense of congruence between its international system, its paradigmatic features and the social and cultural structures which are part of it if the account of its internal life and external relationships is to hang together. If an international movement is to exist an internationalist sentiment is required. Such a sentiment exists when a feeling of anger is aroused by the violation of internationalist principles, or when a feeling of satisfaction is aroused by their fulfillment. To put it in the social critic Raymond William’s terms, an international organization requires certain hegemonic figures. In western history the knight and the cowboy were such figures. In the international Bahai community the pioneer is such a hegemonic cultural figure. The pioneer provides the Bahai community with an organizational force, a person and an activity which connects otherwise separated and even disparate meanings, values and practices. The knight, the cowboy and the pioneer are archetypes. The pioneer evokes part of the image of what the international Bahai community should be. The term appeals to disparate parts of the community, parts that are required if the Bahai community is to extend itself to every section of the globe in the decades ahead.

The stories of the knights were essential to defining England as a nation in the late middle ages. Painted as romantic purveyors of right, upholding chivalric ideals, and commencing on exciting, colorful quests, the knights appealed to all, aristocrat, merchant, and peasant alike. The timing of the overwhelming popularity of the knights’ tales strongly suggests that these tales, and more specifically, the knights depicted in them, provided England with a central icon around which to establish identity as a nation. The pioneer in the last eight decades and even more so in the next several decades has been, is and will be essential in propelling the Bahai community into the international arena so that every cluster on earth is inhabited by Bahais and especially the approximately 10,000 existing clusters in which there are at present no Bahais.

In the attempts of the Ruhi Institute process to integrate religious conviction and practice with concern for material advancement in some places and service activities in most others, Bahá'ís find often, but not always, unique solutions to problematic issues in development and community participation. For Bahá'ís, the essential goal of any development or service undertaking is the implementation of Bahá'u'lláh's instructions regarding the creation of a united world. Projects are sustainable when they harmonize the inner need of human beings to understand their true reality with their outer needs for sustenance, shelter, and support. The Bahai community is slowly becoming more adept at accommodating a wide range of actions without losing concentration on the primary objectives of teaching, objectives we have always had with us: expansion and consolidation. Much of the philosophy, the ethics, the psychology and sociology of the Ruhi process and the hundreds of development projects in the last three decades are written about elsewhere and it is not my purpose here in this book to expatiate on these aspects of the institute process as they have developed around the Bahai world, except to a limited extent in this overall statement which is attempting to provide some kind of synthesis of views and ideas, concepts and notions regarding this new paradigm.

The institute process, although not an entirely new term, then, is certainly one that has been given an elaboration and definition in the last dozen years, a more detailed and focussed framework for action for the international Bahai community. It is a framework, initially designed by the International Teaching Centre after some three decades of the Bahai community's use of some of the institute nomenclature going back, at least in my memory, to Jenabe Caldwell in the 1960s if my memory serves me well. The institute process is a critical, a crucial, some might say, the centrepiece of the new paradigm. Three documents were central to the initial definition and elaboration of this international institute process, a process that deals with teaching and consolidation on the one hand and service and community building on the other. These three documents were each prepared by the International Teaching Centre and published in: April 1998, February 2000 and April 2003. They say a great deal about the institute process, a great deal that was just not present in the Bahai world before the late 1990s--and readers are advised to begin with these documents if they want to read about the initial description, the initial elaboration and outline of the details of this paradigm that I leave out here in this discussion.

Let me close this section with an excerpt from a talk by Universal House of Justice member Dr. Payman Mohajer. Dr. P. Mohajer encouraged the participants at a seminar held in Haifa in mid-2009 to reexamine the Ruhi Institute books from a society-wide, social-action, perspective. He suggested that we reflect on how the concepts embedded in this Ruhi-institute-educational program could be used for social action and not just for the sake of expansion and consolidation. The very first quotation in Ruhi Book 1, Dr. Mohajer emphasized, talks about the betterment of the world through pure and goodly deeds. We need to remind ourselves, in this context, that the reason for becoming more truthful is just as much to contribute to a better society as it is for the sake of our own spiritual progress. It is clear that we need to imbue institute participants, those engaged in our core activities, with a vision of social transformation as well as personal transformation. If someone were to ask us, Dr. Mohajer concluded, whether the purpose of our inviting them to join study circles is to make them Bahais we can confidently say 'no' and tell them that the purpose of our core activities is to assist in the transformation and betterment of society. Indeed, the House cautions the Bahai community that the nature and purpose of social action "is not to be judged by the ability to bring enrolments." it also cautions the Bahais against "projecting an air of triumphalism."

NOT AN "US AND THEM" PICTURE IN THIS NEW PARADIGM

Mohajer's comments here echo the words of Douglas Martin, the former director general of the Baha’i World Centre Office of Public Information, from a talk he gave in April 1992. Martin said at that time, in the years immediately preceding the initiation of this new paradigm that the Baha’i community had not yet "been able to escape a certain connotation of exclusivity.” Such a connotation, he went on to say, had inevitably arisen from the efforts of the Baha’i community in the teaching field and the Baha’i community’s consequent preoccupation with conversion and membership as well as the intrusion, like some necessary reflex action and its accompanying impulse, of an “us and them” mentality. Conversion to a new religion is not the focus in this new paradigm, as I have pointed out elsewhere in this book; it is, rather, the provision of th emeans to bring about the Golden Age of humanity. The focus in this process is on meaning and purpose to give hope and happiness to everyday life.

The culture of learning, the paradigm shift, that the Baha’i community has been engaged in since the mid-1990s, and which had been initially intimated by Martin, among other intimations in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I have referred to above, involves a heroic effort to shed a number of previous and now quite inappropriate views in the Baha’i community. This shedding of old, now archaic views, it seems to me, is all part of this paradigm shift.

The process of spiritual development is “essentially a solitary pursuit....it is a process of refining one’s character, of cultivating the practice of prayer, meditation and regular reading of the sacred Texts." These solitary activities are, by their very nature, things done in the privacy of ones chamber, so to speak. This has always been the case. This is not to say, of course, that these activities can not be done in groups, again, as they always have been done, as the option has always been present, coextensive with the private aspects of the spiritual life for the Bahai. The process of learning, like the spiritual life, is also and inevitably both an individual exercise and a group experience in one of several of their many and various forms. It is also something that requires an effort. Self-education and self-motivation, independent of group processes goes hand-in-hand with formal and informal education if an individual is ever to make any significant advancement in their life. In this new paradigm, individuals can chose to weigh their learning on the side of an individualistic approach or a group approach or some combination of both. All of this is, in the end, left to the individual. Whatever enterprize one engages in as a result of personal initiative or as a result of engagement in some group activity like an institute or a devotional meeting, a study circle or a cluster meeting, one needs to purge ones heart and motives, otherwise, as Shoghi Effendi emphasized as far back as 1923, "it would be futile to engage in any form of enterprize." Over the years of his ministry, the Guardian emphasized many other factors that determined success. A thorough study of his writings will often explain why it is that particular activities lack the success we would wish them to have and why it is that gradually, gradually and little by little is the nature of the process in which we are all engaged as well as how numerous are the stages that remain to be traversed and how far off our desired goal lies.

If the Ruhi program promotes one way of reading Scripture, a way that focuses on a plain, outward and acontextualized understanding of a quotation, a quotation without any historical or major literary context, this does not need to be seen as an undermining of other approaches to interpretation, approaches which promote a multiplicity, a variety or just one or two other methods. Scripture can be read and studied in a multitude of ways and there has grown-up, in the last several decades, a fine literature for Bahais to draw on in their pursuit of these approaches. The field of literary studies, the study of literature, now has much to assist any serious student in the study of the writings of this Faith should he or she wish to go beyond what is often some simple, superficial and simplistic approach. Of course, not everyone is that serious and not everyone has the time of inclination. We are all left to our own approach, our own method and, in this new culture of learning, any one of many specific forms and practices in groups and on ones own.

Some Bahais devote their lives to the study of the writings of their Faith and some only give this study very little time and effort. There is no formula, no A to Z method, no just-follow-this and you will come out on top approach. As I say, just to emphasize a point and parenthetically: there is now an extensive, a massive, literature in the field of literary studies that is useful should Bahais wish to make use of it to illumine their understanding of the extensive literature of this new world Faith. This new culture of learning is, among other things, bringing new awarenesses of the many approaches to learning and interpretation; and it is already beginning to result in a “growing confidence and commitment of the believers which has been reflected “in the thrust of individual initiatives,” a thrust which is gathering momentum. There is, as I indicated above, a much richer expression of the diverse talents of the friends, an expression which is beginning to appear in the Baha’i World—a richness that bodes well for the future progress of the Cause. Of course, this richer expression, this deepened study and commitment to learning does not and will not take place everywhere and with everyone across the thousands of Bahai communities and the many millions of Bahais on the planet. This point hardly needs making but, surprisingly, such an obvious point is often missed as discussions seem to assume that either progress is being made everywhere and on all fronts or, if the person is of a more pessimistic and skeptical turn of mind he only sees inadequacy and weakness, lack of commitment and failure to deepen everywhere confirming, in the process, his pessimistic skepticism. Perception and focus is often the mother of invention, the mother of not only ones cosmology but also ones view of the Faith to which one belongs.

STATISTICS YET AGAIN AND BAHAI BEST PRACTICE

That this richness and diversity will not appear in all 120,000 localities where Bahais reside, among all the more than 2000 indigenous tribes, races and ethnic groups, the 20,000 LSA areas and the now 16,000 clusters that cover the planet, as I say, should not be expected. In the early 1950s when my mother joined the Bahai Faith there were less than 1000 LSAs and some 3000 localities. One could argue, as I have done in this book, that there has been exponential growth. But the issue is far from simple and too complex to deal with in the framework of this book. The Bahai Faith should not be measured by its weakest links. There is a range of statistics that I could draw on to paint a very discouraging picture of the experience of the Cause in the West and in many places in the third world. But as the sociologist Will can den Hoonaard points out in the last paragraph of his illuminating study of the first fifty years of Bahai history in Canada, what happens at the local level in Bahai community life is not the major or the sole measuring rod for the quality of the international Bahai community or the quantity of its global membership. The term best practice, the belief and the associated activity in which there is a method, a process, an incentive or a reward that is more effective at delivering a particular outcome. A given best practice is only applicable to particular condition or circumstance and may have to be modified or adapted for similar circumstances in other locations. In addition, a "best" practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered. As the term has become more popular, some organizations have begun using the term "best practices" to refer to what are in fact merely rules or frameworks, organizational constructs, which cause a linguistic drift from previous patterns. Documenting and charting these procedures and practices is a complicated and time-consuming process often skipped by secular and religious organizations even though they may practice the proper processes consistently.

Naturally enough in the thousands of Bahai communities where the numbers are very small, say less than a dozen of so, with great distances to travel between localities, much of this new paradigm goes by the wayside or, when implemented, may not be able to follow the core sequences of activities to the letter. After 32 years of teaching in classrooms and another 18 as a student, I am more than a little aware of the need for immense flexibility when one is involved in the teaching process and in the evaluation of programs. This is true both in the Faith in and out of the institute process and in classrooms in the wider society. Statistics, while a valuable tool, do not tell the whole story in either ones private life or in the public domain. They are a complex, a subtle, often misleading but necessary entity in any pursuit with pretensions to being scientific.

In some ways the institute process is a type of best practice, a template, to standardize a process and its documentation. The term best practices has implications of finality, obedience, authority and universality. The term also implies that some source has the final answer to a matter in dispute or disarray. The matter is closed, decided, set and resolved. The term "better practices" seems to seek better ways, which may even lead to tweaking the suggested practice to make it even better. It suggests that all of us together can come up with something better than any one of us can arrive at individually, and places authority in the community. The term often implies that the better practice is not universal, but depends on the specific situation.

Bahai localities, the innumerable small registered and unregistered groups across the planet, one in which I live myself here in northern Tasmania, are part of an endless, infinite series of experiments at the local, national and international levels, part of a global model, a global effort to realize Bahaullahs vision of humankinds oneness. Of course, the Bahai Cause and its paradigms, this immense experiment, is and has often been measured by critics who focus on a plethora of negative factors: (i)the words and deeds of mortal men, (ii) the behaviour of individuals and communities, (iii) declining numbers or static enrolments (iv) the slow development of the Cause in many a town, city and region, indeed (v) one can now find a list of factors as long as your proverbial arm posted on the internet by the cynical, disillusioned, negative and critical people who expatiate on these factors and these several criteria. Those who come across the internet sites which dwell on these negative factors might wonder what they have stumbled across and, as has happened to many seekers across the planet I have little doubt, they have stopped their search and gone elsewhere. I am often left wondering if such critics are describing the same Faith as the one to which I belong. There is much in the Bahai community to criticize; indeed, there is much in the lives of everyone and anyone to criticize should one want to focus on weaknesses and human deficiencies.

I will site two quotations from many possible ones, which underline a best practice which has always been in place in the Bahai community at least since the Guardian institutionalized the charismatic Force that initiated this whole process in the middle of the 19th century. It is a best practice which had already been stated, put in place, by the Faith's Central Figures Who had done the preliminary work for this new administrative order in the years 1844 to 1921. The first quotation I will draw on was written, as far as I know, in 1921, in the first year in which Shoghi Effendi was the Guardian:

Not by the force of numbers, not by the mere exposition of a set of new and noble principles, not by an organized campaign of teaching - no matter how worldwide and elaborate in its character - not even by the staunchness of our faith or the exaltation of our enthusiasm, can we ultimately hope to vindicate in the eyes of a critical and sceptical age the supreme claim of the Abha Revelation. One thing and only one thing will unfailingly and alone secure the undoubted triumph of this sacred Cause, namely, the extent to which our own inner life and private character mirror forth in their manifold aspects the splendor of those eternal principles proclaimed by Bahaullah.(Shoghi Effendi, Bahai Administration, p.66).

The second quotation underlining what might be called a view, an underpinning, of Bahai best practice in this and all Bahai paradigms is the first paragraph of Bahaullahs Book of Certitude:

The essence of these words is this: they that tread the path of faith, they that thirst for the wine of certitude, must cleanse themselves of all that is earthly - their ears from idle talk, their minds from vain imaginings, their hearts from worldly affections, their eyes from that which perisheth. They should put their trust in God, and, holding fast unto Him, follow in His way. Then will they be made worthy of the effulgent glories of the sun of divine knowledge and understanding, and become the recipients of a grace that is infinite and unseen, inasmuch as man can never hope to attain unto the knowledge of the All-Glorious, can never quaff from the stream of divine knowledge and wisdom, can never enter the abode of immortality, nor partake of the cup of divine nearness and favour, unless and until he ceases to regard the words and deeds of mortal men as a standard for the true understanding and recognition of God and His Prophets(Bahaullah: The Kitab-i-Iqan, pp.3-4).

George Orwell put the same idea a little differently: "As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.(The Road to Wigan Pier) This idea needs to be kept firmly in place by those millions who will become attracted to this Faith in the years of this new paradigm. George Orwell also had another idea which is useful to keep in mind as this new paradigm increasingly manifests itself across the planet. "In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion, wrote Orwell, "But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not," the individual can practice a certain amount of eccentricity; but when human beings are supposedly governed by love or reason they are under continuous pressure to behave exactly the same way as everyone else."(Politics vs. Literature)And finally and to continue in the same vein I will draw on the French sociologist Gustave Le Bon who wrote that: "One of the most constant characteristics of beliefs is their intolerance. The stronger the belief, the greater its intolerance. Men dominated by a certitude cannot tolerate those who do not accept it."(Opinions And Beliefs)

Let there be no mistake. The Bahai paradigm is aimed at increasing the number of adherents across the globe in every cluster and locality. But the process is little by little and day by day, not by force, but by the inner life and private character of individuals within the framework of a new world order. This new world order is described in the Bahai writings in many places and it is not the purpose of this book to outline the character and the detailed framwork of its operation. This book is about the process of winning the hearts and minds of the people of the world in this new community building narrative which began, as this book emphasizes, in 1996.

NO SURPRISES ANY MORE

After fifty years of listening and talking as well as watching and analysing the teaching process both in the Bahai community and in the secular world, I don't get surprised to anything like the same extent as I once did in my younger years by the failings and inadequacies of my fellow Bahais, of those in the wider world or, I might add, of my own self whom I have come to know so well in all its weakness and deficiency. Destructive and negative forces can and do enter Bahai community life and our own quotidian experience so very easily. The world is tired of words and yearns for human example, for models, for excellence and with new people coming into the Cause all the time existing side by side with veterans who are often worn-out and tired, words is often many of the believers--old and new--have. This, of course, is itself a somewhat harsh and pessimistic view, but it contains some truth as many who read this book I'm sure will testify.

PROGRAMS--PRINCIPLES--REALITIES

Living up to principles is no easy task even within the context of new paradigms. This has always been the case and, in all likelihood, always will be; for this life is a world of contradictions, paradoxes and immense complexity, human inadequacy and sin--to use a word with old currency. But, as Bahaullah emphasizes so often, one must cease to regard the words and deeds of mortals as signs of true religion and the recognition of God and His prophets or as signs, it might be added, of the progress of this new paradigm. Adjusting principles to the reality, the lesson, of facts is no easy matter, especially when the fires of enthusiasm and dedication are burning in the breast and hoped for results are not forthcoming or, as is often the case, the hoped for results bring more problems than were originally anticipated or that can now be coped with without much renewed effort and commitment.

If the expression of the diverse talents of individuals and if the number of believers completing the Ruhi books has increased, but this has not led to increased enrolments; if the mobilizing of Baha’is to do anything often attracts non-Baha’is thus making what some might call “the non-specific aims and aspects of the study circles that are working” and not their specific aspects; if some Bahá’ís do not want to take part in the Ruhi-institute programs; if some of the believers see this new paradigm as some uniform system imposed coercively from the top-down on each and every believer for each and every seeker no matter what their background; if some believers see non-participation as a form of covenant breaking; if an apparent lack of success of this new program is placed at the door of the familiar phrase or the notion that: “it has not been implemented properly;" if the presence of covenant-breakers on the internet is giving that old and tiresome group whose numbers have always been negligible a public space far out of proportion to that paucity of numbers; if in implementing the core sequence of Ruhi books presents unanticipated problems that make their very implementation a difficulty or a process that raises new, unforeseen problems-—these are just some of the tests and issues, questions and criticisms, that such a work in progress in the Bahai community must deal with. Community activities and individual initiative are always confronted by new struggles and difficulties for each and everyone of us. This has always been the case and I would suggest this problem, these problems or variations of them, will be with us for decades if not centuries in some form or another as this new Faith grows in proportions and numbers that we can barely envisage at the present time. Problems and difficulties, like itches that must be scratched or endured or both--will always be with us.

NEW ENGINES OF INITIATIVE

The engine of initiative and group activity must always be ready to adapt if it is to result in the many forms of successful engagement in Bahai activity and in efforts to promote the Cause. Until this new paradigm LSAs and Groups among other collectivities were the focus of the need for adaptation. In this new paradigm, the Bahai community now has clusters and study circles, institutes and direct teaching processes among other activities and collectivities to do the adapting. And adapting is not always simple and easy. It often beats the best of us. Failure, the inability to adapt, to alter, method and approach, habit and lifestyle, it must always be remembered, is one of our best teachers--perhaps our best. But we do not always learn from failure even when it brings fear as it often does. We are often fixed in our temperaments, our lifestyles, our personalities, our community group-styles and complexions, if you like.

TESTS AND INACTIVE BELIEVERS

Abdul-Baha informs us that the test comes again and again in more severe forms until we learn. One of these tests is the simple lack of growth, stasis, dealing with the same people, the same problems year after year until our spirits are numb and we want to escape. The inactive believer is one of these results and people on the enrolments lists who have no phone numbers, addresses or contact point of any form. There is always something on the plate of Bahais, some criticisms, some difficulties, that must be dealt with and answered from within and without the community itself. This is a reality of community life and it has been the case right back to the year dot in 1844 as well as in 1826 and in 1793 when Shaykh Ahmad left home in those precursor years that prepared the way for the Babis. And difficulties will be on our plates, so to speak, in the decades and centuries ahead.

This religion attaches much importance to freedom and personal initiative, as I have said above, and if there are some Bahais who do not want to take part in some activity, they are free to do so in the same way they are free to fast and to pray or not to fast or pray. Compulsion is in so many ways contrary to the very spirit of the Cause; penalties are not imposed on those who do not take part in various aspects of Bahai activity, however central that activity is to the development of the Cause. But personal grievances arise which are difficult for members of the community to forgive and forget. So much of our society is disillusioned and cynical and living example in community or in an individual form that counters the world's dark forces is no mean achievement. The work of this Cause has always involved imperfections in ourselves and others. And the struggle is ever-present.

QUANTITATIVE RESULTS ARE OFTEN SMALL-INSIGNIFICANT

The institute work “has significantly reinforced the long-term process by which a universal system of Baha’i education will take shape,” but for many believers the process, the effectiveness, the results, at the local level thusfar have been very small, inconspicuous and problem creating--rather than problem solving. The trials encountered seem to be, as they have been for more than a century and a half, necessary and inevitable ones “that refine endeavour and purify motivation so as to render those who would take part worthy of so great a trust.” Not getting too upset over the many unfortunate and often superficial things which occur in so many aspects of our Bahai lives as individuals and as communities is as essential as oxygen is in the air, if we are to breath easily and continue to work and to serve. Feeling discouraged and anxious are experiences that are part of our lives, even lives that are fundamentally assured and happy ones. The standards by which we measure this Cause are not to be found in the behaviour of others and often, as we all know, some of our keenest tests arise out of our relationships with the Bahai community itself.

Beyond and beneath all this, of course, is the necessity for each believer to strive to become a more effective teacher. As the International Teaching Centre pointed out, if we are not meeting people to teach, all of the plans, campaigns and reflection meetings aimed at finding ways to share the Divine Message with the waiting masses are to no avail. To put this another way, “no amount of organization can solve inner problems or produce or prevent victory or failure at a crucial moment.” As Shoghi Effendi wrote during the height of WW2: “Ultimately all the battle of life is within the individual.” This battle, however private and personal, however individually focussed and centred on the inner life, also involves an individual alignment or conjoining of motives and objectives with those of the larger society, with action and involvement with others. The achievements are often, if not mostly--and I can not emphasize this enough--to be attained little by little and day by day. They are the work of a lifetime and, as long as this new paradigm is part of our lives, this paradigm provides yet another context within which these achievements can find expression. I hasten to add that this process will in all likelihood take place even unto our life in the world hereafter when the paradigm shift of paradigm shifts comes part of our experience in the land of light the journey continues.

INSTITUTIONAL MATURATION--GROWTH--ENTRY BY TROOPS

If this new culture of change with its concomitant emphasis on entry by troops was all about numbers, then Douglas Martin would never have said that the “maturation of the U.S. Baha’i community since the 1960s has been breathtaking;” nor would Peter Khan express his concern that, when he hears people talk about entry by troops, he “internally cringes.” The Plans, Dr. Khan went on to say, are about “advancing the process of entry by troops.” It is simply unrealistic in many places to expect a large increase in numbers or even a small increase in the short term. It should not surprise us that all the Central Figures of this Faith have also made the same kind of remarks as have Their legitimate successors, those who represent the institutionalized form of the charismatic authority at the centre of this new world Faith. The key word is “process” not “troops” and not “entry.” I draw this to the attention of readers here for the second or third time in this book because of its fundamental importance to this discussion. The recent developments in the last year or two, involving as they do, the distinction between direct and indirect teaching, are often seen as new. Of course, in some ways, they are, but in other ways they are distinctions that have been around for decades. Sometimes they result in new programs with promising results and sometimes they dont. They offer to the believers yet more opportunities to engage in teaching activities, more options, various types of teaching campaigns and activities with results that will be seen in the fullness of time, if not tomorrow and if not in ones own community the day after.

I would add that this new paradigm of the last two decades is about membership, but membership seen in a different light than it has been in the lives of those who have joined the Cause in the first six decades of the teaching Plans(1936-1996). Although there is much discussion about entry by troops and direct teaching in many ways numbers are a secondary issue. The language of this paradigm is not about us and them; it is not quintessentially about enrolments, conversion and a range of other words and terms that have preoccupied the Baha’i community, that have focused its energies and its goals, on numbers---a critical but necessary focus and preoccupation of the first six decades of those plans and, indeed, the three-quarters of a century before(1863-1937)the formal implementation of Abdul-Baha's Plan in 1937. Douglas Martin made this point in the early 1990s before this new paradigm came into effect. He emphasized in a published talk that the Bahá’í community must make a heroic effort to shed much of the baggage of the past. If tests and difficulties beset the Baha’i community in these early stages of the implementation of this paradigm then “such tests are the surest evidences of that process of maturation.” Such tests are the inevitable precursors to a broadening and a widening of the very processes in which this community is engaged. My work on the internet has been a broadening and a widening of contact with others. I engage with people all over the world in direct discussions about the Cause for more than I do in this town in Tasmania and far more than I have in any other of the 24 towns where I have resided.

THE RISE OF A NEW RELIGION: INNER LIFE AND PRIVATE CHARACTER

I have often thought that the work of the sociologist, Max Weber, in his study of the sociology of religion provides a helpful context for this new emphasis to which Douglas Martin alludes. Weber, one of the last two century's major two or three sociologists, emphasizes how world religions arise by a coming together of a secular ethic and a religious ethic. The necessity for one world, a unified and federated planet, places the Bahai Faith and its teachings in a central place in the coming decades and this new paradigm and the changes and chances that will take place within it in the coming years, it seems to me, are part of the preparedness of the Bahai community for this inevitable expansion however slow it is may be in many places--like the place I live in here in Tasmania and the places I have lived in most of my Bahai life. As we work through this major shift, this new paradigm, though, it is important that we keep before us, as I indicated above, a number of fundamentals. The Guardian put some of these fundamentals in context right at the start of his ministry in 1924 in an ‘oft quoted passage:

"Not by the force of numbers, not by the mere exposition of a set of new and noble principles, not by an organised campaign of teaching -- no matter how worldwide and elaborate in its character -- not even by the staunchness of our faith nor the exaltation of our enthusiasm, can we ultimately hope to vindicate in the eyes of a critical and skeptical age the supreme claim of the Abha Revelation. One thing and only one thing will unfailingly and alone secure the undoubted triumph of this sacred Cause, namely, the extent to which our own inner life and private character mirror forth in their manifold aspects the splendour of those eternal principles proclaimed by Bahaullah."

Some of that complexity I referred to above, in light of this quotation, reduces to a "living the life" answer to the questions and issues. This new culture of learning “implies that Baha’is must not only learn from their Scriptures and from the collective wisdom of the group....in the study circles, but they must also learn from their own experiences.” More recently, Momen says he sees “the community as an aid to the individual’s personal mystical progress.” This, of course, is hardly new, although Jack MacLean in his interesting critique of some of Momen’s ideas emphasizes that the basic thrust of Momen’s comments “is to make a major shift from the individual to the community.” As the Bahai community travels through the many stages of this paradigm shift it must continue as it has tried to do for decades--and not always with success--to avoid the tendency to divide into two antagonistic groups: those who blindly follow and to the letter the teachings and those who question and doubt everything. These two extrems should be avoided.(UHJ, Letter, 1980).

SLOW GROWTH: AN INSIGHT FROM SHOGHI EFFENDI AND ROGER WHITE

Another context for an analysis of this complexity that I would like to include here because of the perspective it offers to both the teaching process and, indeed, much that has been my life and my efforts to promote the Cause. The quotation comes from God Passes By. Shoghi Effendi writes that the process whereby the unsuspected benefits of the Cause "were to be manifested to the eyes of men was slow, painfully slow, and was characterized, as indeed the history of His Faith from its inception to the present day demonstrates, by a number of crises which at times threatened to arrest its unfoldment and blast all the hopes which its progress had engendered."(GPB, p.111). Frequently in my years as a Bahai and also in my personal and professional life crises have arisen which threatened to arrest whatever unfoldment had occurred in my life or in the life of the Cause. Hopes have been blasted many times but still, as Roger White puts it so well in his poem "Notes On Erosion," hope "renews itself under the cool metallic stars, springs up intractably like the p esky weed....yields its head but not its root." "Neglect," he emphasizes, fosters, dismays and fertilizes "its thrusting growth." Indeed, it "insinuates itself through the sockets of despair's bleached skull." I quote the poet Roger White because his poems so often, as they do here, express my Bahai experience so essentially--far better than an outline of what I have actually experienced, what is normally placed in a memoir and what I have written in my analysis of this paradigm shift.

ABDU'L-BAHA'S MEMORIALS OF THE FAITHFUL:

DECEPTIVELY SIMPLE BIOGRAPHIES FOR A LEARNING AND GROWTH PARADIGM

About twelve months, perhaps even less, before completing the last of His books, Memorials of the Faithful, ‘Abdu’l-Baha began His Tablets of the Divine Plan, the foundation statement for all the future teaching Plans and the framework of action within which the Baha’i community could put into practice all the good advice He had given it in His Memorials of the Faithful among His many other writings. Like The Will and Testament, though, it may take a century or more to grasp the implications of this surprisingly subtle and, deceptively simple, book and, indeed, the vast corpus of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s writings. Perhaps that time is insensibly arriving now that we are in the earliest stages of community building with clusters and core activities, with study circles and devotional meetings, with children’s and junior youth classes and deepenings, with external affairs and a range of other departments and agencies of this efflorescing Cause. Perhaps it is time to really begin to get a handle on Bahaullahs teachings and those of His Son and to make our own personal deepening in the writings a primary, if not the primary, focus of our lives.

If, in the end, personal commitment and deepening, a focus on the inner life does not take place, the group experience loses its relevance. It should also be emphasized, indeed it hardly needs saying, that however deepened one soul is--for a community of growth to result many other factors, aspects of community building, need to be in place. If growth is going to result in our communities with their novices and their veterans; if the patterns of growth from the first century of the Formative Age and the Heroic Age before that, are to be replicated in our time, in the epochs ahead that are the backdrop for this paradigm, only time and those mysterious dispensations of a Watchful Providence will unveil what are growth's secrets. We who are called upon to bring about this growth will do what several generations of Bahais have already done in the last 17 decades. We need only read the history of this Cause to see what they did: the active and the inactive, the deepened and the uninformed, the several dualities we have lived with so long and which have begun to fall away in this new paradigm.

History is not predictive in many ways; it is not a science. But the Bahai view of history is, at a minimum, religious. It is also about providential control, but in quite a different sense in its workings than in its seemingly and highly arbitary form found in either Christianity or Islam. The Bahai view of history is teleological, that is: it is under the complete control of God, under providential intervention within the processes of historical evolution. It is not a fortuitous composition and arrangement. There is no contemptus mundi, no historical pessimism. The Bahai philosophy of history has as its cornerstone a belief in progress through providential control of the historical process. The Bahai view of the future is also prophetic and speculative, visionary and utopian. This is the wider context of mystery and wonder, of promise and threat, that lies as a backdrop for the new Bahai culture. From speculative and utopian pursuits we must be satisfied with speculative and utopian benefits. (See Nash, The Pheonix and the Ashes, 1984, p.89)

WRITING BIOGRAPHIES MYSELF: LEARNING FROM MEMORIALS OF THE FAITHFUL

As I look back over these six decades of pioneering and travel-teaching, I contemplate writing more biographies as I had already done following the model that 'Abdu'l-Bahá has set before me in that seminal literary work that I refer to here. For a period of twenty-five years, from 1981 to 2005, I wrote some two dozen biographies. They are found in Section IV of my autobiography entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs, the section marked 'biographies.' In 1981 I had taken my first excursions into writing biography. Those excursions became part of, first, The History of the Baha’i Faith in Tasmania: 1924-80 and; second, The History of the Bahá'í Faith in the Northern Territory: 1947-1997. The short biographies I had written in the 1980s and 1990s are, for the most part, now in the archives of the Bahai Council of Tasmania and the NT. Some of these short sketches of human personality are in a file in my study, a file which has increased in size since it was first created in the early 1990s. Some of my sketches are on the internet at bahai-library.org. But they will not be included in my autobiography which I am posting on the internet since the people are, for the most part, still living, and confidentiality is an issue. The notes I have collected on the subject of biography, which I began to collect seventeen years ago in 1993, have begun to assume a far greater extent, a wider ambit than was initially planned due to the plentiful resources available on the Internet and my own general and increased interest in the subject. My current plans are to write one major biographical work with material in much greater depth of expression than I have done thusfar. This biography will come from a more fertile base than I have been able to discover in my first, my sketchy,attempts in the 1980s and the 1990s.

Whatever biographies I write, they will be part of Section IV of my larger autobiographical work, Pioneering Over Four Epochs. My biography file/s have developed into a more substantial resource in recent years, as I have indicated above, and a brief examination of the table of contents of these files will show the wide range of relevant sub-topics. This biographical interest provides some balance, although I must confess very little so far, to counter all the autobiographical material I have collected in other files. It will, perhaps, counter any impression of my narcissistic tendencies which critics may be inclined to dwell upon. The material on biography that I have collected will prove useful, or so I hope, in my efforts to write some mini-biographies in the years ahead as part of Section IV of my autobiographical work Pioneering Over Four Epochs. Most of the people whose lives I have written about were pioneers. In the decades ahead in the context of this new paradigm in which, by 2006, there were still 10,000 of the 16,000 clusters in the world unopened, the Bahai frontier, the field of a necessary and inevitable pioneering activity was still immense. More than half of the globe, as measured in cluster-geography, was still unopened. That part of the planet held great promise; it was a garden of potential, a space with infinite resources and future plans. In the decades ahead in this new paradigm this great landmass and its peoples would be part of an increasingly discrete and multicultural Bahai international identity. The Bahai pioneering world, the physical, locatable frontier place across the planet, the imaginative space that would help to rhetorically and conceptually structure Bahai internationalism would be one of the continuing themes and topics for discussion in this new context of learning and growth--and in my own sphere if literary work as part of my individual initiative, my own contribution to the growth, the extension, of this Cause to every corner of the planet.

Pioneering will be in this new Bahai culture what it has already been for decades in the Bahai community, an anchoring theme. It was a theme not unlike the one used by John F. Kennedy when he spoke of the “New Frontier” during his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination in 1960: "We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier – the frontier of the 1960s – a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils – a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats. . .The new Frontier is here whether we seek it or not. Beyond are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus which demand invention, innovation, imagination, decision. I am asking you to be pioneers on the New Frontier." President Ronald Reagan drawing on the same theme in 1982 proclaimed at an Independence Day celebration that the “conquest of new frontiers is a crucial part of the American national character.”

It was not by accident that Abdul-Bahas Tablets of the Divine Plan were addressed to the North American Bahais. Pioneering was a theme which, as I write these words in 2010, has been in use in the American Bahai community since the mid-1930s, if not as far back as the 1890s. It is a theme which could be said to have helped launch one of the greatest of the previous paradigm shifts,a shift associated with the launching of the first formal teaching Plan in 1936. I leave this theme to readers to investigate as their interest in Bahai history is developed in the decades ahead.

There are vast continents, frontiers of pioneering, awaiting the Bahai community in thought patterns,in discovery, in social and economic activity, in human relations and the interpersonal domain, potentially more prolific in the release of human potential than ever before. The concept of the pioneer and the frontier is so versatile and can be so easily invoked to underpin spiritual and community, economic and social, calls to action and to stimulate those who are allegedly inactive, whatever their temperament. The concept of the pioneer I'm sure will be preserved and extended in the decades ahead. “Frontiers breed frontiers,” as Archer Butler Hulbert wrote in Frontiers: The Genius of American Nationality back in 1929. The frontier spirit is alive and well, Hulbert wrote, as Americans continued to pioneer “intellectual, social, and political” frontiers before the term pioneer even became common coinage in the 1930s in the Bahai community. And this process has really only begun in the last three-quarters of a century(1936-2011) both in the wider culture and in the Bahai community. Within this new paradigm pioneers will take this Faith to every cluster on the face of the earth; I have little doubt.

The Bahai community, both the lives within it and all of their accompanying ideals does not occur either naturally or by accident. It is framed by design when a writer like myself goes to put its story on paper with description and analysis. An international organization like the Bahai Faith requires some sense of congruence between its international system and the social and cultural structures which are part of it--if the account of its internal life and external relationships is to hang together. If an international movement is to exist an internationalist sentiment is required. Such a sentiment exists when a feeling of anger is aroused by the violation of internationalist principles, or when a feeling of satisfaction is aroused by their fulfillment.

To put this concept in terms used by the social critic Raymond William’s, an international organization requires certain hegemonic figures. In western history the knight and the cowboy were such figures. In the international Bahai community the pioneer is such a hegemonic cultural figure. The pioneer provides the Bahai community with an organizational force, a person who connects otherwise separated and even disparate meanings and meetings, values and practices. The knight, the cowboy and the pioneer are archetypes. The pioneer evokes an image of what the international Bahai community should be. The term appeals to disparate parts of the community, parts that are required if the Bahai community is to extend itself to every section of the globe in the decades ahead.

The stories of the knights were essential to defining England as a nation in the late middle ages. Painted as romantic purveyors of right, upholding chivalric ideals, and commencing on exciting, colorful quests, the knights appealed to all: aristocrat, merchant, and peasant alike. The timing of the overwhelming popularity of the knights’ tales strongly suggests that these tales, and more specifically, the knights depicted in them, provided England with a central icon around which to establish identity as a nation. The pioneer in the last eight decades and even more so in the next several decades has been, is and will be essential in propelling the Bahai community into the international arena so that every cluster on earth is inhabited by Bahais.

North Americans, the recipients of the Tablets of the Divine Plan, have, it seems to me, a continuing urge to chart new paths and explore the unknown. That instinct drove Lewis and Clark and a host of other explorers to press across the uncharted continent and into the extremities of its Arctic wastes and "sustained twelve Americans as they walked on the moon."(James Beggs, NASA Administrator, 23 June 1982) From the voyages of Columbus, to the Oregon Trail,to the multitude of explorers all across the North American continent, to the journey to the Moon itself and, for the Bahai community, more than a century of pioneering, history proves that Americans have never lost by pressing the limits of their frontiers.(See: George Bush, 20 July 1989, in Catherine Gouge, "The Great Storefront of American Nationalism: Narratives of Mars and the Outerspatial Frontier," Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2002, Volume 1, Issue 2

A deep-space mission to Mars is a focus for the new century. It's like westward expansion. The effort and journey will spark creativity and imagination. So wrote Dr. Jon Bowersox, consultant for the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, 14 February 2000. For the Bahai community, both in North America and throughout the more than 200 countries and independent territories throughout the world, a focus for the 21st century is to build Bahai communities in all the 16,000 clusters on the planet. The task is immense and "throughout the coming centuries and cycles many harvests will be gathered.(TDP, 1977, p.6)

"The frontier that was opened by the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492, over 500 years ago, is now closed," astronautical engineer Robert Zubrin has argued. "If the era of Western humanist society," Zubrin went on to write, "is not to be seen by future historians as some kind of transitory golden age, a brief shining moment in an otherwise endless chronicle of human misery, then a new frontier must be opened. Humanity needs Mars. An open frontier on Mars will allow for the preservation of cultural diversity and will create a strong driver for technological progress(Robert Zubrin, Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, New York, 1999. p.123). For the Bahai community in this new paradigm the equivalent of this frontier of Mars, indeed the many frontiers in our universe in the sciences: biological, physical and social, is the new culture of learning and growth and its accompanying pioneering and travel-teaching venture in the decades and perhaps centuries to come.

Of course, Mars is not, in fact, like the American frontier; nor is the American frontier like the Bahai pioneering experience. Mars is 150 million miles away; it's atmosphere is 7 milli-bars of CO2 so that once you arrive there you would die instantly on the surface. It doesn't have any of the qualities that the American frontier had, that is, of individuals deciding, say, in the Old World of Europe or the eastern states: "I'm fed up here. I'm going to sell everything that I own. I'm going to jump on a boat. I'm going to be a poor person in America because this will be better than what I had before." This is the quality of the frontier that does not exist on Mars. The Bahai pioneer is also not your frontierman or cowboy. Each Bahai pioneer has his or her own story. My narrative entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs is but one of these stories.

It is impossibile to fit Mars into paradigms imported from Earth. It is equally impossible to use the wild west analogy. There are no really useful historical analogies and parallels for the Bahai diaspora. Such historical or futuristic comparisons may have some value in helping pioneers take moral responsibility for the complex changes—social as well as biospheric—initiated by terraformation and community building. Pioneers must be more humble about their place in history, must accept responsibility for their actions and yet resist the impulse to stake too large a claim for themselves in history books, must resist the sense of triumphalism--to use a word that has become more current, more popular, in recent years.

One recent article "Can We Go to Mars without Going Crazy?" in the May 2001 issue of Discover magazine argues that "designing and building a sophisticated spacecraft capable of getting to Mars is just the beginning. This is also true of the Bahai pioneer. The society, the community, he is involved in building is just at its beginning. The ultimate challenge NASA faces may be building a tiny computer that can psychoanalyze astronauts and keep them from going nuts.(Weed, 38). The ultimate challenge the Bahai faces is the building of a community that is part of the new Bahai paradigm of learning and growth. The whole question of getting all that we want in life, part of the pioneir-frontier drive is simply unrealizable. The desire to realize one's hopes in the frontier as a pioneer can be both deconstructive and self-destructive. It is not a place of guarantees.

There is often a lean provision for the devotion the Bahai brings to the challenge. Like the experience of Noah, there are often weeks and months of never-ending dark. The challenge is not for the timid, the vainly pious, the pusillanimous of spirit, the overwrought. The voyage is a long one with unseasonable rains and a long wait for the salient dove to bring the living twig.(White, Pebbles, p.71). The investment of the Bahai in the promise of the pioneering journey on the frontier to make him a whole and powerful citizen often will simply ensure that he remains split and inadequate. It's a basic condition of Bahai life to have ones identity and sense of self challenged to the hilt. When a Bahai buys into an a-historical fantasy, a view of Bahai life that is not imbued with true understanding of the pioneering-frontier life, he or she may become somewhat pathetic hoping to undergo an experience from which, due to some deliberately built-in defect, he will remain excluded. Everyone is called but few are chosen. Forgetting and forgiving the harsh words that are part and parcel of community experience is not something everyone can do. Being selfless is a goal not a reality of our lives.

I have always seen the Bahai community as a pioneering society. It is a community in which the script has been written and the parts are assigned by its Central Figures and legitimate institutional successors. But it's also an improvisational theater where people can write their own parts, and in which anyone can play a useful part, whether conceived by someone else or by themselves. So, it's a very liberating thing and I think that's what the Bahai community will create in the decades ahead in cluster after cluster. It is a very progressive branch of international, the global, human culture. The highly diversified Bahai community will produce conventions that will be very useful as the international community struggles with the challenges ahead. These conventions and the individual and community inventions, the result of Bahai individual and community ingenuity, will be useful in community after community across the planet. The Bahai community will be an example of a society that places a high value on each and every person because each and every person is precious. But do not expect the process to be easy; do not expect the life to be lived a joy-ride. If you participate to any significant extent beyond being a passive spectator, it will require all you have. In the end, as that founder of psychology William James once wrote: the question will be "to what extent can I give the all that is my life?" What is the measure of your sacrifice of self? Each of us has his or her own limits except for a small handful, a very precious few. Perhaps it is these few who are the movers and shakers of true civilization?!*

From the perspective of those pioneering in to populate the various sized clusters on the planet, prospective frontier places are often spaces of unfulfilled hopes and dreams, like the frontiers in the wild west they are often fantasy spaces of unlimited potential but a potential not to be realized in the first years of pioneering or even the years after much effort has been expended. It is this potential which those who encourage the pioneers, the Bahai institutional marketers of Bahai pioneering-frontier experience, the proponents of frontier community development often exploit to secure the participation of the community.

The Review Office of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahais of the United States has given me permission to post this work at internet sites like BLO. This work is a multi-genred opus and includes: letters, narrative, poetry, prose-poetry and conceptual material from the social sciences and humanities. The three Parts of this work, of which this is the last here at BLO, are just a start to a many-volumed work, a work that can only be found on the internet and only in part. One day this vast memoir may appear in a hard or soft cover set of volumes, but I am not holding my breath waiting. Indeed, if this work ever does appear on book shelves I shall be long gone into a world where man speaks no more, at least not in the same way he speaks here.

Readers will come to understand the meaning of this broad play of my mind, this reminiscent fieldwork on myself, this way of pointing to who I am, to this self-creation, the more they read the material in this cornucopia. My memory browses and grazes at will stringing apparently dispersed and disordered parts into what is hopefully a fine thread of many colours. It is not the coat of many colours of the long lost Joseph but rather a rough-tough coat with a fine and tender lining. The processes of age have worn down that lining exposing my inner being to all sorts of unanticipated developments that will in the end bring about my demise.

The storms of these epochs have reqired of me a good strong coat to weather the tempest of the times. As I contemplate the past, my past, and write I lose myself under the whole pressure of the spring of my memory proceeding from my most recent revisitings and their associated recognitions. If all goes well I make of the revisiting a veritable hymn of the wonder of it all as the past floods in with its particles of history, with its scrapings of gold dust, of lead and base metals, with its wayward fragments and their meditative extrapolations. I feel a little like the American essayist Joseph Epstein who wrote that "if one wants to be a writer, he must first make himself incompetent in everything else." I strive not to be that bungling in the majority of my pursuits but, as I progress through these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood, the years 60 to 80 as the human development psychologists call these years in the lifespan, I have tried to limit my various pursuits however competent or bungling I may be in their execution in order to focus on my writing. I find in writing autobiography, poetry or essays, the three major genres of my work, that material for my writing can come from all over the place. For this reason readers may find this memoir not the smooth running course they expected at the start.

So much of my life as a Baha’i has been a life-in-community and this paradigm shift is intended to assist in the process of community building, a process that the House of Justice informed us has only just begun at the outset of this new paradigm shift in the mid-1990s. It seemed to me only appropriate that I would give a few words on the subject of Bahai life in community to the brilliant tactician 'Abdu'l-Bahá who survived one of the most difficult communities and advised us on how to live in difficult communities in our time. Our own communities have been, are and will be challenges for us to live in. For this reason 'Abdu'l-Bahás words, written less than six years before He passed away, in Memorials of the Faithful will be timely.

I can not deal with this relevance in sufficient detail to adequately explore the implications of this book which often gets lost in the avalanche of resources that have become available in the Baha’i community in the last three decades. Suffice it to say: the 77 individuals in this collection of mini-biographical sketches give us every conceivable human type—the sort of diversity which is our life in Baha’i communities and which will be even more so in the years to come within this new paradigm. Abdul-Baha recognizes and describes the infinite variety of types in the new Bahai community he lived in during the years, 1863 to 1915, when He wrote His book. He saw this variety as a delightful thing, a thing to accept, to acquiesce in it and enjoy it. That is our challenge as it was His. For enjoying this diversity and dealing with it effectively in Bahai community life is no easy thing. I have been trying to deal with it in my personal and community life sometimes successfully and sometimes with immaturity, with attachments, sometimes with a type of love that has blindly inclined me to error; and sometimes with dislikes and antipathies which have repelled me away from the truth.

These personal inadequacies, of course, are what one could call colloquially: "the same-old" and "the same old." Or to draw on a French expression: "the more things change the more they stay the same." These personal and community deficiencies are often discussed in my memoir for they are part and parcel of my life but I rarely talk about them and, in the process, name individuals; I don't discuss the difficult people in my life in my autobiography in personal terms; I rarely mention the sources of internal dissension, the names of people who caused me or the community hardship and tribulation. In this sense my autobiography is quite unlike many of those in the modern marketplace which explore individual failings of friends and family to the nth degree. I see such exposure of individuals as a type of gossip and to be avoided like the plague. What is true in writing is also true, a fortiori, in everyday relationships in community life.

While we all go about working out how we will participate in the life of this new paradigm, Abdu'l-Bahás 77 biographies are useful to reread. Abdul-Baha had to deal with some very difficult people as well as enjoy the company of some wonderful souls. Bahaullah, Himself, often responded to major disputes by telling the parties to work it out th.emselves or by declining to comment on the dispute. For you and I this is often the best recourse as well. Bahaullah, it seems to me as I look back at the first three decades of Bahai history (1862/3-1892/3) in what could be seen as the first paradigmatic expression of Bahai community life, exercised what one might call moral suasion. He attempted to persuade; sometimes He issued rather stern counsels or reproaches. But his authority was often, and in the main, moral. His advice and counsel was often ignored more often than we might like to admit. There was a core of very devoted and sincere Bahais, of course, who engaged in an almost court-like etiquette around Bahaullah. But Bahaullah had to deal with the rude, the insolent, the unbalanced, the petty squabblers, the independent of mind, indeed, some very difficult people as did Abdul-l-Baha after Him. One forgets that most Bahais in that first half century, say, 1863 to 1913, were very lightly socialized to Bahai values. As one writer put it with some insight, Bahaullah had more authority among Bahais than many a mujtahid, but it was authority and not power--and it probably worked practically in many of the same ways--persuasion, tacking with the wind, encouraging people to get along.

My main point here, in referring to this first half century of Bahai history and the lives of both Bahaullah and His Son, is that these Central Figures of our Faith often had the kinds of problems we already have and will have within this new paradigm. People in community are the greatest drama in history and in our lives and this drama contains joy and sorrow, tragedy and success, victory and loss. Bahai history is, as John Hatcher has described so well, a metaphor for our own time, our own experience, our own lives, and not some factual and dry details that happened long ago. It throws light on to our paradigm and we are going to need it as we travel along that paradgim's road.

As we go about living and working, teaching and consolidating, serving and building communities in this new Bahai paradigm, we need to be conscious of avoiding what is sometimes called a present-participle existence(drinking, eating, sailing, having fun) and the devastating consequence of the perpetual bombardment of the messages of consumer capitalism. The result is often that many of our memories and ideas are not our own. The result too is that the society we are trying to construct is often not that partnership of the living, the dead and those yet to be born. Rembembering Bahai history, knowing what went before is crucial to building and thinking, feeling and understanding in the present. There is a struggle involved in remembering, in knowing, what happened from 1844 to 1996 and, if one include's Nabil's Narrative, what happened back to the 18th century. If the struggle to remember against forgetting or, worse, not knowing, is won the result will be an achievement of the continuity in which individual and cultural identity is founded. This identity will be part and parcel of the new Bahai culture without which will often be a destruction,a vacuity of thought, of feeling, of tradition and of spirit.

NEW PARADIGM: NOT CREATED EX NIHILO

It should be obvious to readers by now that a strong thread of my theme in this analysis of the new paradigm and my experience of it is an emphasis on its continuities with the past; this new paradigm, this new shift, has not been created ex nihilo. It does not in the least imply that we disregard the century and a half of divine guidance which preceded these latest in the long series of fate-laden days. Individual creativeness, collective creativeness, the acquisition of consultation skills, an emphasis on a culture of learning and of growth do not delimit one jot or one tittle, as we used to say, an emphasis on the individual struggle with what you might call the existential realities of life. Life tests which still come our way will always remain opportunistic situations with potential for profound spiritual and moral development and, one might add, opportunities for loss, for failure and disappointment. For all is not about winning and success. Shoghi Effendi pointed the believers time and again toward these quintessential spiritual realities with his very practical and down-to-earth exegesis.

"A persistent and strenuous warfare” indeed, as one writer put it, a personal jihad, is something we all must wage against our “instincts and natural inclinations.” We must engage in a heroic self-sacrifice in subordinating our “own likings to the imperative needs of the Cause of God.” Suffering, matched with endurance are qualifiers of greatness whether one reads Ruhi books, participates in institutes or fasts--or not. The gift of acceptance seems to be a gift not given to all. The acceptance of life and its difficulties is something all of us only accomplish in part. It is one of the many gifts at the table of bounty. We each seem to be given greater and lesser gifts and radiant acquiescence is one of those rarer gifts. If this new paradigm is helpful in finding souls on the planet who exemplify such gifts--and I have no doubt that it will--even if not in my own community or many others, then it will have instilled fresh vitality into this world Faith.

Shoghi Effendi did not waste words on sheer argument, on hairsplittings and disputes, on what is often called casuistry or quibbling, on idle and endless discussions of the superfluous, but emphasized, rather, the writing and discussion of high thoughts which are “the dynamic power in the arteries of life...the very soul of the world.” He knew only too well that the inner struggle we all face is the ultimate battle in life and is not a popular sport to engage in at the best of times. It often requires, as I mentioned above, “the discipline of waging a mental jihad,” writes Jack MacLean, a jihad against illusions that imbed themselves inside the souls of men and often take possession of their very lives, what Baha’u’llah calls idle fancies and vain imaginings, insatiable appetites and delusions which, by their very nature, cannot satisfy nor appease the hunger, cannot fulfil their tacit and often not-so-tacit demands of the ego and its appetitive nature. In the world of jihads as in the world of battles, many are lost--and in the case of the kind of jihads that MacLean refers to: they are not engaged in at all. They are just too hard for the average person and as I survey my own life that incapacity includes me a great deal of the time if I am honest with myself.

It seems to me, in retrospect, that what are sometimes called the interregnum years, the years between the passing of Shoghi Effendi and the election of the Universal House of Justice, were themselves part of a wide paradigm shift, a shift that occurred during the two decades, 1952/3 to 1973/4, in the international Bahai community. Beginning with the Holy Year 1952/3 and the Ten Year Crusade and lasting to the end of the first plan of the House of Justice in 1974, this new world religion was transformed from a global community of about 200 thousand, 90 percent of whom lived in Iran, to over one million in some 120 countries. This five-fold increase in numbers was without doubt one of a number of contributing factors to that paradigm shift, not the least of which was the transition to the fully institutionalized charisma in a globally and democratically elected, a fully legitimated body at the apex of Bahai administration.

It is not my intention here to describe in any detail or make any general comments on the above paradigm shift as I have done in relation to the shift that took place in the 1920s and 1930s, although the first two decades of my Bahai experience took place in these two decades, two decades which saw a transformation in my own life from the age of 9 to the age of 29, the years of late childhood, adolescence and the first decade of early adulthood. The focus I want to put under the microscope briefly is not that period of time but this most recent shift: 1996 to 2016 and beyond into future phases, stages, episodes and epochs as this new paradigm assumes a much more detailed, institutionalized and comprehensive system of learning and growth for many more millions of people in the decades ahead at this climacteric in history.

I would like to include here a quotation on the matter of authority within the entire set of complex forms on the elected and appointed side of Bahai institutions. Authority resides only in the duly elected institutions. these are the Rulers of the Cause. "The authority to direct the affairs of the Faith locally, nationally and internationally, is divinely conferred on elected institutions. However, the power to accomplish the tasks of the community resides primarily in the mass of the believers. The authority of the institutions is an irrevocable necessity for the progress of humanity; its exercise is an art to be mastered. The power of action in the believers is unlocked at the level of individual initiative and surges at the level of collective volition."(Compilations, NSA USA - Developing Distinctive Bahá'í Communities)

THE EMERGENCE OF A PUBLIC IMAGE

In the middle of the then Seven Year Plan from 1979 to 1986, the signs of the crystallization of a public image of the Cause, uninformed but friendly, were becoming evident and the emergence of the Cause from obscurity was becoming more apparent. In my own life I was, at last, emerging from my bipolar disorder with a medication that would take me to new levels of healing, with periodic alterations of medication and concomitant life-styles, for the rest of my life or so it seemed even as I write these words nearly thirty years later. The “early signs of a crystallization of a public image,” in those 1980s were subjected to this fundamental, this paradigmatic, shift just at the time when the Baha’i Faith was emerging from an obscurity in which it had been enshrouded for a century and a half. Of course, the Bahai Faith, being the global religion that it is with communities in some 200 countries and independent territories, did not enjoy this public image everywhere to the same degree and everywhere in the same context. Indeed, this question of public image is far too complex to deal with in this limited space as the emergence of my own life from the quagmire of bipolar disorder, job loss and marital frustrations in which I found myself in the late 1970s. I deal with issues of this nature spread over the 2500 pages of my life-story. I make no attempt to deal with these issues here for they would waylay my themes and particularly my focus on this new culture, this new paradigm.

Still, I would argue that if I could come back in one hundred years, say in 2108, and examine the quarter-century, the years 1983-2008, it would be plainly apparent that the first global public image of the Cause was given its initial crystallization in this twenty-five year period, a period which also saw “the very beginning of the process of community building,” a series of remarkable and dazzling achievements, the awesome tapestry of beauty spreading over the mountainside of God’s Holy Mountain and a stage in an immense historical and institutional process that entered a critical phase in its efforts to canalize the forces of a new civilization. And when the roll is called up yonder and I look back over my own life, these same 25 years, will be seen as a quarter-century in which my own life was transformed, recreated and redefined--leaving me sometimes in a state of ecstasy and at other times in a despair from which I often hoped I could escape from by death. Sadly or not-so-sadly I lacked the courage to end it all and always lived to see another day patched up with medications to give me the partial illusion of a spiritually-based life. But more on this later.

In 1983, the governing body at the apex of the Administrative Order of this Faith, the Universal House of Justice, occupied its permanent seat in an imposing marble building faced with 57 Corinthian columns at the top of an arc-shaped path. The final two buildings, built on either side of the Seat of the House of Justice, were completed in 2000: the Centre for the Study of the Texts and the International Teaching Centre Building. I could expatiate on the many other sources of this early crystallization of a public image in addition to this complex of buildings and gardens on Mt. Carmel. For example, the two new houses of worship, one in Apia in Western Samoa and the other in New Delhi in India, completed in 1984 and 1986 respectively, as well as the vast increase in literature that became available to seekers and to the many interest groups which increasingly dotted the landscape of society helped establish this public image and helped the Bahá’í community at the same time in the creation of a collective identity. In the same way I could expatiate here on the developments in my own life: in writing, in my career, in my family and marital life, in my Bahai community life-and I do as this narrative memoir unfolds in all its labyrinthine complexity.

One central part of this image, this identity, largely below the surface of popular culture where most people spend the vast majority of their time and where much that constitutes public images is born and dies, is the extensive literary productions and publications that have emanated from the Baha’i World Centre. As well as the several important messages, letters and books that have been produced by this institutional trustee of Baha’u’llah’s global undertaking at the apex of the Baha’i Administrative Order: The Promise of World Peace(1985); Baha’u’llah(1992); The Prosperity of Mankind(1995); Century of Light(2001); Letter to the World’s Religious Leaders(2002); One Common Faith(2005), a multitude of statements were published as a result of the work of the Baha’i International Community which focus “on the promotion of a universal standard for human rights, the advancement of women, and the promotion of just and equitable means of global prosperity.”

This latter category, largely subliminal even amongst most of the Baha’is due to the massive increase in print resources especially in the last twenty-five years, but a crucial aspect of the Baha’i public image nevertheless, an image confined to a coterie but spreading out across the planet in many layers of significance and meaning with the infinite number of publics, was accompanied by other manifestations of a public image which I won’t dwell on here, for that is not the purpose of this paper. The burgeoning quantity of literature that has become available in this quarter-century, 1984-2009, has been paradoxically and ironically a contributing factor to both a deepening and clarity of understanding on the one hand and an obscurity and complexity on the other that has made the discussion of many issues fraught with difficulty. That is one of the areas, the motivations, that has given rise to my writing this paper, this extended analysis of this new paradigm of culture and of growth in the Bahai community. And so, too, has the massive quantity of my own writing emerged in this 25 year period but readers can find this topic covered in great detail over these 2500 pages.

THE INSTITUTE PROCESS: MORE THAN DEEPENING

In many basic ways the institute process with its study circles and Ruhi materials, with its devotional meetings and childrens and junior youth classes, with its operation in clusters and LSAs and with several other Bahai activities, institutions and processes that have come into a more integrated focus in the last 15 years--are each and all ways and means for all of us to work together in these earliest phases of community building, to learn together and grow spiritually and numerically. This new culture of learning and growth, this new paradigm of action is more than deepening although, like some of the deepening activities that all Bahá’ís are familiar with, it is a decentralized system of locally based group learning. There is no need for me to describe this institute process in detail. It is not my intention in this book for this kind of detail is provided in many other places and sources for Bahais everywhere if they are interested.

At Ridván in 1967, after I had been associated with Baha’i activities for more than a dozen years, the House defined deepening as an expression of our individual and group efforts “to obtain a more adequate understanding of the significance of Baha’u’llah’s stupendous Revelation” and “a clearer apprehension of the purpose of God for man.” But our Baha’i community life is challenged, is summoned, to what you might call a specific application of this deepening process; indeed, we can now be said to be at the very beginning of the process of community building itself. The House of Justice reminded us and made clear that the institute process is not a series of deepening classes. It is rather part of a very wide framework for this community building process. But whether one engages in deepenings or institutes, whether ones lives in large urban agglomerations with thousands of other Bahais or pioneers to remote places with only a few believers or none at all, whether one goes to study classes or writes books, vulnerabilities and propensities to evil, having to deal with ones dark, animalistic heritage, ones lower nature, ones insistent self often seems to be beyond our capacity. But as George Townshend once said: there are mysterious turning points or watersheds and one finds the wherewithal to deal with the test or one does not. Sometimes a battle is won by inches; sometimes failure or defeat results because we simply do not try hard enough; and sometimes this very failure proves to be the next giant step on the path to spirituality. the process is complex and it is not the purpose of this book to deal with this complexity. There is coming to be an immense Bahai literature on this and other subjects for the votaries of this Cause to enlarge their understandings of such matters.

On 9 October 2005 Farzam Arbab defined a training institute as: “an agency for the development of human resources dedicated to the advancement of the process of entry by troops. It is not my purpose here to discuss the nature and purpose of the institute process, the study circles with the Ruhi materials as their core curriculum, the clusters, the devotional meetings, the children’s classes and junior youth activities. These topics are in need of no more details nor discussion as I have pointed out above. There are several major sources of explanatory frameworks, of talks by significant Bahá’ís as well as comments by a multitude of Bahá’ís on the internet at many a site, of booklets of materials, of resources prepared by innumerable NSA’s, by clusters and by regional communities/councils, among other institutional bodies. These sources, taken as a whole, leave no doubt that this institute process is not a spasmodic, uncoordinated process characterized by a series of exertions that lack clarity and single-mindedness. They provide a context for lucidity and precision on a complex and profound process. The extent to which each of us grasps this complex process clearly at any one moment and the extent to which many minds which are not easily satisfied understand this deceptively simple, but in some ways quite profound, process is quite another question.

Our task, my task and yours in 2011, 2012, 2013 and in the years following to, say, the end of the first century of this Formative Age in 2021, is to ask ourselves what we can do to hasten the attainment of the goals of the current plan and, in the process, inscribe our mark on this brief span of time so charged as it is with potentialities and hope. These years will see the first years of the 7th edition of my memoir, a memoir that attempts, among other things, to place the work I do within this new paradigm in focus and perspective. This memoiristic activity is not part of a narcissistic "look at me...look at me" exercise, it simply outlines one person's response to the challenge of this new paradigm. That is all each of us can do is rise to the challenge in our own individual ways.

The catalogue of terms, processes, issues, problems, tasks and goals we are faced with in this new paradigm possesses a vastness that I can only hint at here. Many, if not most, of these tasks and goals existed long before this new paradigm of opportunity arose. Some of them were given greater specificity during this new paradigm--like junior youth programs. Programs are now open to all junior youth, young adolescents between the ages of 11 to 14, regardless of faith. They are increasingly being held at the neighborhood level. The groups help junior youth to develop their moral, ethical and spiritual framework in an enjoyable group setting, facilitated by an older youth or adult, known as an animator. The Universal House of Justice describes junior youth as a “special group with special needs, as they are somewhat in between childhood and youth” (Ridvan 2000 message). Children's classes, junior youth, youth and other programs will be on my spiritual and our community plates until I and most readers here depart from this mortal coil. For, as I have said before only this time I will say it in French being from the officially bilingual country of Canada: "plus c'est change, plus ca la meme chose." Still, it is difficult for many to appreciate the immense strides in the work with children, junior youth and youth. For someone like myself who remembers the picture in North America and knows from his reading what it was like in virtually all countries in the West in these age-categories of Bahai community life back in the 1950s, the shift in numbers, focus and systematic program implementation is immense.

Let me quote but one example from one of the 1000s of examples of work with children in Bahai communities around the world in relation to the core activity of children's classes. The example is found in that talk I quoted earlier in this book that the composer Ludwig Tuman gave in Florida at that social and economic development conference. Tuman is also an educator who has worked with children as well as adults for many a year. He said in that talk that he had always been impressed with children’s ability to grasp spiritual principles and make them their own. He talked about a young six year old girl named Jasmine who studied composition and piano with him. Tuman brought her along to his talk and she sang a song she wrote about ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. It was called “Softly His Voice is Calling”. Its words were written more than a century ago by a Louise Waite, an American believer and writer of hymns, to whom ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gave the name, Shahnaz Khánum.

Tuman gave Jasmine the words written by Louise Waite and asked Jasmine to set them to a melody of her own making . She wrote the melody and then Tuman added the rest. Together the two came up with the song. Tuman suggested to his audience to imagine how the general public attending an open devotional meeting in their own local community would feel when they saw and heard expressions of faith rendered through art works and performed by children as well as adults. Of course, not every community has a Ludwig Tuman in it and not every community has children. The Bahai community I am in has neither a Tuman or any children and our engagement in core activities in correspondingly different than the community Tuman cites as his example. To each their own. From each according to their capacity and circumstances as the House keeps saying in letter after letter.

DR ARBAB HAD MANY THINGS TO SAY ABOUT THE INSTITUTE PROCESS

HE WROTE ABOUT THESE THINGS BEFORE THE PROCESS WAS LAUNCHED AND AFTER

Dr. Arbab emphasized the importance of “each individual taking charge of his or her own learning....What is at stake is the level of consciousness achieved, the will created, the desire aroused and the degree to which what is learned is internalized and translated into action.” In the absence of willpower, it hardly needs emphasizing, the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.

Dr. Arbab said much more in his papers, papers I read as far back as 2004 when he came to Australia and in his small booklet 'Lectures on Bahai-Inspired Curricula' published in 1994, a decade before his public talks in Australia. I will add just two of the many sentences that especially impressed me in that excellent series of talks on the subject of: the institute process, learning and growth. “The overall process," he emphasized, "is enormously complex and simplistic ways of approaching it can be counterproductive.” And secondly: “Capability empowers a person to think and act in a well-defined sphere of activity and according to a well-defined purpose.” Perseverance is often difficult; rising above one’s limitations is easier said than done and, since so much of what we are engaged in are processes, the work, the task, the passion of our lives, is and will be forever incomplete, only partially satiated. Insofar as my teaching on the internet is concerned, I feel that this sentence applies very well to me and my work: “Capability empowers a person to think and act in a well-defined sphere of activity and according to a well-defined purpose.” And to each his or her own it must be added. That is only obvious.

In Dr. Arbab's series of lectures published in 1994, containing as they did some of the first published exploratory comments on the Ruhi institute in its most recent dress, a dress it began to assume in the 1990s, emphasized a range of factors in the development of curricula materials: creativity, reflection, consultation and action. As I read these lectures that came into my hands in 2004, ten years later, ten years after their first publication, I was reminded of the discussion of curricula in Bahai educational circles back in the 1960s and 1970s, especially the work of Daniel Jordan and Dwight Allen at the School of Education University of Massachusetts. Those discussions and their work, among the work of others in the field, was for me in those years as a new teacher myself, part of one of my own paradigm shifts in my understanding of education, learning and teaching. Between the year my mother entered the Cause in 1953 and the year I arrived in Tasmania as an international pioneer from Canada in 1974, the Bahai Faith--and my own life--experienced a paradigm shift and a significant part of that paradigm shift was in the world of learning and the cultural attainments of the mind. In one national report in 2007 a national assembly noted a narrowness of focus and an inflexible system of implementation as a result of the new paradigm and not enough personal initiative, innovation, creativity and audacity.

MARSHALLING OUR ENERGIES

This book in many respects is about marshalling our energies and whatever reflections and actions we can bring to the processes of this paradgim shift at the local and regional levels. This most recent shift is the focus in this book not the other shifts which I comment on briefly in the hope that those comments will increase our understanding of this shift. As each of us does this in their own bailiwick, domain or orbit, these processes will also take place at the local and regional levels elsewhere in their own country and in countries all around the world with continual guidance from the NSAs, sometimes referred to as generals in the army of light. Guidance will also be provided from the Baha’i World Centre from the several appointed institutions and the Universal House of Justice. This Centre in Haifa Israel now has some 700 people working in various capacities as part of the administrative and spiritual focus of an international community. This guidance assists Bahais everywhere in their understanding and in their implementation of the plans and programs in both individual and community lives. In the last two decades the focus, the work, at the BWC, has itself gone through a paradigm shift as I discuss in small part in relation to that triple impulse initiated in the three decades between 1891 and 1921.

THE DECEMBER 12 2011 UNIVERSAL HOUSE OF JUSTICE MESSAGE TO ALL NSAs

This section will contain a discussion of this most recent, and lengthy, message of six pages from the House of Justice to all the world's NSAs. I leave it to readers to read and reread this message, a message which contains a survey of the most recent developments in the new Bahá'í culture to the end of the year 2011. Like all House of Justice messages, it needs to be read in the context of previous messages as well as a knowledge of the wider literature on the Cause. To read a message ex nihilo often depreives a message of a relevant context and places the reader in a bewildering situation, a situation in which he or she is faced with a complex structure whose functions can not be grasped because there is just too much to take in. Ours is an age that seems to require simplistic explanations. Whom the gods would destroy they first make simple, then simpler and even simpler, as one literary critic once observed.

The House of Justice begins by informing all NSAs of the opening of 100s of new clusters due to the movement of homefront pioneers. Given the fact that over half the world's clusters had no Bahá'ís at the beginning of this new FTP in April 2011, this movement of pioneers is a heartening development. It is also a development which will increase in the years ahead as the international Bahá'í community aims to open all, most, or at least the majority, of the world's clusters in the years of this new paradigm, a paradigm which introduced the concept of cluster only at the turn of this 3rd millennium among many other terms and concepts.

Given the difficulties and the challenges, that present themselves to Bahá'ís in small groups, in isolated localities, I will post here a link to the experience of one Bahá'í in a rural area, in a small Bahá'í group. Go to this link for a sad, but all too common an experience: http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/bigquestions/history.html It is not a new experience. Becoming and remaining an active Bahá'í is no easy process and never has been in the more than a century and a half of the history of this Faith. New believers are often tested by their fellow Bahá'ís, by an administration which for many is a strange and complex phenomenon, and by a sea of new literature in an age which has become, for millions, an audio-visual one with print taking second place to what the House of Justice calls a mesmerizing sea of entertainment and what media analysts now call infotainment--for their modus operandi of learning.

This new message from the House of Justice provides guidance to NSAs and their training institutes, in the main, on the implementation of the main sequence of courses in the Ruhi curriculum. This message: reiterates the organizing principle and the purpose behind the Ruhi program; mentions the fact that there will eventually be 18 courses; outlines the current paths to service that exist; discusses the coordination of programs for children and their teachers, junior youth and their animators, as well as adults and their tutors on the one hand and the three month cycles of activity on the other; discusses study circles, Area Teaching Committees, and the 40 sites for the dissemination of learning established by the OSED(Office of Social and Economic Development; outlines in general the educational materials and philosophy, as well as the projected 18 textbooks for junior youth; and, finally, mentions the creation of an international Advisory Board to assist the Ruhi Institute in the preparation and distribution of resources.

In these last years of the second decade of this new Bahá'í culture, this new paradigm is unfolding piece by piece and part by part, agency by agency and program by program, initiative by initiative and enterprize by enterprize---as the elected and appointed branches of the Cause apply the many instruments which are slowly tempered in the crucible of their personal and institutional experience. As these individuals and institutions do this the persecution of their co-religionists in Iran continues day after day and month after month bringing the attention of the world to this new Faith. The capacity needed to employ these instruments with a high degree of coherence and in a pattern of life is slowly being fostered year after year, sometimes with a predetermined path, but often with no predetermined course. Stumbling bocks must be made into stepping stones, as they always had to be in previous paradigms. What is at stake, so often, is not complaince with a set of procedures but the unfoldment of an educational process.(28/12/'10) At a future time, hopefully before the end of this first year of the current FTP in April 2012, I hope to integrate this new message to NSAs into a coherent discussion of the previous messages as well as the wider literature of the Cause. For all the House of Justice messages need to be seen as a comprehensive whole and not as isolated documents existing ex nihilo.

MISTAKES CRITICISM AND THE TENDENCY TO ARGUE

In the process many mistakes are and will inevitably be made at the local, the cluster, the regional, the national, the continental and the intercontinental levels, but these mistakes are, for the most part, not serious enough to warrant creating inharmony and raising issues that lead to endless argument, personality conflict and wasting time. The human tendency to take sides and fight about some issue, to challenge and criticize decisions of assemblies, thus presenting a sense of a divided community, is so easy to do. Personality conflicts have been part of Bahai experience since 1844 and there does not appear to be any end in sight for these baleful influences on (a) community life and (b) the expression of energy and harmony at all levels of the Bahai community. Dealing with criticism seems to be part of our lifelong search and labour, in the challenges involved in overcoming estrangement that is the lot of Bahais everywhere. This has always been the case. It was the case in the 1920s and 1930s as well as in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. As the paradigm shifts take place, continuities also take place in the life of the Bahai community and one of these continuities is criticism. I do not want to dwell on other negative aspects of community, life and society experience here, although such discussions are unavoidable in this memoir. I would now like to turn to other continuities in my Bahai community life since the mid-1990s and some of the shifts in the paradigm of opportunities and activities that I have experienced and that I have observed elsewhere not only in my own region but around the wider world.

SOME PERSPECTIVES ON LIFE HERE IN MY OWN COMMUNITY AND CLUSTER

DEVOTIONAL MEETINGS

With a new Five Year Plan(2011-2016) that has just opened in the last month, I would like now to make some comments about my local Bahai Group(Reg) and the new paradigm. We began our devotional meetings in 2003 in this town of 7000 at the end of the Tamar River, five kms from the Bass Strait, an extension of the Great Southern Ocean. Devotional meetings are one of the three core activities to use the language of this new paradigm. This activity was an initiative of the Five Year Plan(2001-2006). This core activity is now in its ninth year in our town and will continue until and if our plans change. All the Bahai teaching initiatives in this locality over the previous dozen years(1991-2003) during which there had been resident Bahais had not involved advertised public meetings of any kind. In the decades before we began our devotional meetings in 2003, Bahais had travelled to this locality in various seed-planting exercises, sometimes called travel teaching; quotations and phone numbers had been regularly placed in the major newspaper throughout the 1990s and prayers had been said by the nearby Bahai community for the progress of the Cause in this town. Our community was what has been traditionally known in the global Bahai program of teaching and consolidation, of expansion and pioneering, as an extension goal of a nearby LSA some 50 kms away.

Bahaullah's writings have always forbidden an aggressive proselytism through which many religious messages have been widely promulgated in society. Inviting people to meetings in public places and in private homes, forming relationships with local people in a wide variety of ways one of which is now called Home Visits, joining local interest groups and what might be called a very mild form of proselytism if one wanted to be critical: all this is and has been part of a general policy of establishing small groups at the local level throughout the Baha’i world. The experience of this small Bahai Group that my wife and I joined in 1999, a dozen years ago, has followed this normal process of Bahai group initiation, growth and development.

The experience of the Bahai community over many decades in Australia and, indeed, in most western countries where this new Faith has grown, has shown that in most places few people ever come to advertised Baha’i public meetings of any kind, especially since, say, the 1950s and 1960s and the arrival of TV, among other socio-historical and technological changes in the last half century. Passivity, perhaps one of many factors that results in few people coming to public meetings, has been bred by the forces of society and people everywhere, at least in the West want to be entertained and led by those who appeal to their often superficial emotions.

And so it was that our Bahai Group approached its task of holding advertising devotional meetings with expectations which were not imbued with unrealistic goals thinking we would achieve, if we just tried hard enough, some kind of 'entry-by-troops,' an oft-misunderstood process at the best of times, especially in the first decade of its extensive use, the years 1991-2001. There are rare exceptions, of course, but the patterns of action/activity and response to Bahai initiatives in many areas of the teaching process are as predictable as the sun getting up in the morning and setting at night. One could say this is simply practical realism, a self-fulfilling prophecy, a meagre response or any one of a number of phrases to capture the experience most Bahá’í communities have had in the West in the last several decades. If intensive programs of growth were to develop; if preconceived notions about the lack of receptivity were to fall away; if a commitment to the process of growth was to be raised to higher levels; if direct teaching was to take place in this oldest town in Australia, it would not be in the form of street teaching or door to door; it would be little by little and day by day--down the track of time as our cluster, our Regional Council and our NSA advanced along their own institutional lines. In our locality of four believers with an average age of 74 until 2011 time would tell how this new paradigm was going to evolve.

In our local community we saw these devotional meetings as opportunities to advertise the Cause, to give it a greater public face in the northern half of Tasmania and, indeed, throughout the state. Our energy was directed toward what we felt was a realistic goal. The Faith had been in the north of Tasmania for over half a century and in Tasmania--where a Regional Council replaced a Bahai Regional Office in the early years of this new millennium and a former Regional Goals Committee--for 80 years when we started planning our devotional meetings eight years ago in February 2003. But the public visibility of the Cause in many of the small towns of northern Tasmania was nil or approached nil. Our intention was to raise the visible profile, so to speak. And this we did.

But other Bahai comunities around the world have been more enterprizing and more successful than we have been. Music and the arts have been integrated directly into many development projects, devotional meetings and a wide range of community activities. The practical considerations of integrating the arts into development programs were admirably addressed in a presentation given by Donald Rogers in the 1999 Social and Economic Development Conference, titled “The Use of the Arts in the Bahá’í Community.” If you haven’t already read it, I would encourage you to on the internet. There was an example of a devotional meeting and it was only one of many around the world showing how music and the arts could lend their support to a specific kind of grassroots social development project? In 1999 the Universal House of Justice called on the Bahá’í world to further develop local communities and reach out to the general public by instituting “regular meetings for worship open to all.” The Bahá’ís of Oxnard, California, along with the neighboring community of Ventura, co-hosted a regular public worship program, held in a community center. Their Assemblies jointly decided to enhance the public appeal of these programs by calling on local talents to integrate the arts into the worship services, especially with the use of live musicians. This stirred enthusiasm in the community and attracted a number of seekers. Melbourne Australia has now had a devotional program called "Soulfood" which is similar to this worship program in California and it is eminently successful--certainly more successful than here in my local community. But, Bahais around the world have to work within their capacities, limitations and circumstances as the House of Justice has pointed out more times than I would want to footnote here. In this new paradigm there are more and more initiatives taking place through the use of the arts but not in my home Bahai group.

HOME VISITS CORE ACTIVITIES AND ADVERTISING

Being aware of my capacities and incapacities empowered me to think and act in a well-defined sphere of activity and according to a well-defined purpose, but outward results as defined by an increase in membership at the local level have still been non-existent. Community building as a process the Bahais were told was at its very beginning in the mid-1990s at the start of this new paradigm. More than a decade and a half after the House of Justice said we were at the very beginning of community building, this still seemed to be the case and I'm sure this sense of beginningness, if one can call it that, will continue to be the case for many decades to come in many, if not most Bahai localities around the planet. In our locality, the oldest town in Australia(1804) with a Bahai history going back two decades we were still taking our first steps or so it seemed. Our community came to define a home visit(HV) as an opportunity to enter into a deep conversation on spiritual matters. It has been my experience now, after seven years of engaging in HVs, that when the visit is clearly just a social call in which: (a) the Faith is not even be mentioned and (b) there is no real engagement with the person in any serious/intimate conversation then that visit does not come into the category HV.

There is a type of educational process, a type of serious dialogue, in which the teacher is clearly building a path to a direct discussion of the Cause, a path he has followed before--and in my case a path in which I have been engaged over many years and decades--and this gives shape to the individual and collective activities that come under the rubric HV. After five decades of firesides, of people coming to the homes of Bahais, HVs took the Faith to others. It reversed the direction; people no longer had to come to the Bahais--although firesides continued. The menu of activities for Bahais to engage in had clearly broadened in this new paradigm.

I would like to say a few things about the interchange that takes place in these HVs. Any serious content, any objective discussion, is engaged in for the sake of sociability. The content is a means to liveliness, harmony and common consciousness in which all can participate alike, all can give to the group. The ability to change topics easily and quickly is crucial to the flow of conversation. The individual, the person making the HV, functions as part of a collective for which he lives and from which he derives his values. But life must emerge in the flux of a facile and happy play of interaction. A deep spring of beliefs feeds the realm of interaction but it must be erected in an airy realm of feelings and attractions, convictions and impulses and not become a lifeless schematism, a serious prove-your-point and win-the-day, form.

The serious person derives from the sociability a feeling of liberation and relief. Seriousness is sublimated,diluted and the heavy content reverberates only dimly since, as Simmel puts it, its "gravity has evaporated into mere attractiveness." There is an art to conversation in these HVs and much of the advice of Abdu'l-Bahá, Dr. Johnson and Kahlil Gibran is relevant here; for example, Kibran writes that: "Friendship is always a sweet responsibility, never an opportunity." I will add to this subject at a later date.(The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Chapter 3, Collier-MacMillan, NY, 1964,p.93.; and H.M. Balyuzi, Abdu'l-Bahá, George Ronald, 1971, p.27) There are also practical realities, questions of how much social interaction each person can cope with, how much time he has, indeed, a myriad factors that relate to how many HVs in which a person can engage.

Devotional Meetings(DMs) have now taken place, as I say above, once a month for nine years in our Bahá'í community of six members. Advertising has included: (a) ads in the print and electronic media--on four radio stations, two TV stations and in two newspapers; (b) 35 posters/month and a total now of over 2100 in the 40 shops in town in which we put posters; (c) 100 fliers/month giving a total now of 10000(discontinued in Jan 2010); and (d) two special Tasmanian internet sites among many non-Tasmanian sites. The total cost of all of the above is: $20.00/month.($10 for a rented country Women’s Association room; $8.00 for one of the newspaper ads and $2.00 for the paper, ancillary materials, petrol, oil, water and wear and tear on clothes, vehicles and our psyches, inter alia)Note: in 2009 the DMs moved into one of the two homes of the Bahais.

It is this advertising that lets people in our Baha’i locality of 7000, and the wider Tasmanian community of about 500 thousand, know that Bahais dot the Tasmanian landscape. Advertising in the 8 different mediums/media and 13 different individual outlets, and more than half a dozen internet sites, through the repeated exposure every month, through systematic and regular information bites, has created a definite public profile for this Bahai Group and, more generally, for the Bahai Faith. This profile is of a friendly but largely undefined group, a group with multi-focused worthy causes, internationalist, tolerant, but only understood superficially not in any depth. Our DMs accomplish many things in the long road out of obscurity and the exercise, we felt, should not be underestimated.

We have been asked to take part in this core activity and we have done so to the best of our ability--well, one can always do better, I suppose, at least theoretically. Our aim is not to build a large concentration of adherents nor even to concentrate on numbers, membership and conversion in any sense. Our entire thrust is to: (a) plant seeds and let people know that the Bahai Faith exists in this region; (b) provide the opportunity for the population to find out about this new Faith through as many channels as possible: by phone, on the internet, by meetings in public and private, by the powerful medium of advertising in a variety of forms/channels and through the relationships each of us have with others.

THE COURAGE TO FAIL

I think the best line from the TV program1 I watched last night was: “it is important for each of us to have the courage to fail.” Fear and superstition in the general public slowed the progress on open-heart surgery, heart transplants and the use of artificial hearts in the field of cardiovascular surgery and medical pioneers like the ones shown this evening simply ignored the opposition in the public domain to their work.

In the years 1944 to 1953 pioneers like Dwight Harken, John Gibbon and Walton Lilleher were three of the major founding fathers of the field of cardiovascular surgery, a field that is arguably just as old as I am: 65 years. Lillehei, with five university degrees in his pocket, completed the first successful surgical repair of the heart. He was 35 and the date was September 2, 1952. He was the first person to look inside a beating heart, which beats 100 thousand times a day and four litres of blood per minute. On May 6, 1953, John Gibbon performed the world's first open-heart procedure under extra-corporeal circulation.-Ron Price with thanks to Dwight Harken in “Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery,” SBS TV, 8:30-9:30 p.m. 13 January 2009.

During this same year, from October 1952 to October 1953, the Baha’i community celebrated a Holy Year marking the Centenary, the hundredth anniversary, of the Birth of the Revelation, the first intimations of the glorious Mission, of the Founder of the Baha’i Faith in the Siyah-Chal in Teheran. This event in the international Baha’i community was the anniversary of an epoch-making period from 12 October 1852 to 12 December 1852, unsurpassed from a Baha’i perspective, by any episode in the world’s spiritual history outside Baha’i history. This Holy Year also saw the dedication of the Mother Temple of the West, the holiest in all the Baha’i world in Chicago on 2 May 1953, an event which marked the inception, again from a Baha’i perspective, of the Kingdom of God on earth and the appearance in the world of existence of “a most wonderful and thrilling motion.”2 In 1953 gilded golden tiles were placed on the dome of the Shrine of the Báb. This was the last unit of that shrine and symbolized the consummation of the greatest enterprize undertaken at the World Centre of this Faith. The year 1953 also saw the inauguration on 21 April 1953, of a ten year world spiritual crusade, the third stage of the first epoch of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’is Divine Plan during which my parents and I became members of the Baha’i Faith in Canada. -Ron Price with thanks to ‘Abdu’l-Baha in God Passes By, Shoghi Effendi, Wilmette, 1957, p.351.

I was only in grade four back then and
just beginning my baseball-years-career,
a fleeting period and my ice-hockey life;
my adolescence and life in a little town
in a little house in a little world with its
birthday-parties, TV programs, endless
indulgences, straight lines at school and
pretty little girls marked: don’t touch!!!

My mother accepted an invitation to a
home of one of those conspirators who
drank from one of those same wells the
ones that could be found, by then----all
around the planet. Not dismayed were
these co-conspirators by headlines they
called to their witness; they carried the
answers like neat balls of coloured yarn,
familiarly handled, spun of truth and in
their ready-made dresses, sensible shoes.
How did my mother get caught in their
web back then when Kruschev was on
his way to the top and a Holy Year was
giving a wonderful and thrilling motion
its kick-start, a kick-start to the Kingdom
of God on earth—and no one really knew?

How did she get caught in their web when
cardiac-surgery was getting its kick-start?
This brutal, bloody and dangerous history
of surgery developed so rapidly because
men were not afraid to fail and so, too, we
refined inheritors, spiritual descendants, of
the dawnbreakers must not be afraid to fail
as we go about teaching the seekers among
our contemporaries year after year with only
discouragingly meagre results dealing as we
do with the fear and superstition of masses
who have no idea of the healing message we
bring as they sink deeper into a slough of
despond and as they do battle with phantoms
of a wrongly informed imagination, ill-equipped
to interpret the social commotion everywhere.

Ron Price
9 January 2009

WHY DO I WRITE?

And so I write, not so much to tell the story of Baha’i history, of the Baha’i community, for that has been told many times. I write as a means of seeking my own understanding, of finding my own voice and, in the process, it is my hope that others will benefit not so much by my example, my insights and views, although I like to think there are some insights in this book that have contemporary relevance, but more from the tone and manner of this book and the sense of encouragement I hope it provides and which I trust results from an honesty about my battles and struggles. If I let others know of my struggles, perhaps others will find the courage to fight their battles when the chips are down. If they know of my trials and despairs, perhaps they will approach their own with a sense of practical realism and not unrealistic hopes and impractical aspirations that so often lead, in the end, to embittered spirits and discouragement which eats at men’s souls.

Turning to the teachings, they may be able to overlook the peculiarities and attitudes of others, inevitably to be found in community, and also come to slowly acquire the skills and the personal meanings, the capacity, that will enrich their own lives and help them cope with the failures and loss they experience as part of their own lives. Beginning with the writings of the Central figures and the battles They had to deal with and continuing over more than a century and a half with a genre of writing that has dealt with the struggles of individual Bahais, this encouragement of the type I refer to here can now be found in many sources both in Bahai literature as well as the religious and philosophical literature on other paths. Such literary sources can be inspirational. And, of course, there are many stories of the experience of others in other communities around the globe available in the mass media which are often even more inspirational and often speak more directly to people's experience.


THE SILENCE ABOUT OUR LIVES
AND OUR SOCIAL-PRIVATE SELVES

There has been, for more than a century and a half, a great silence on the part of most of my fellow believers when it comes to autobiography, memoirs, life-writing, accounts of their experience and that of their community. There has been an equal silence, a gap, an abyss, which I find fascinating, between the outer self, in some ways a fictitious but certainly a social, on-stage, person whom I and others carry partly like a mask about the world and a secret, inner, self. This is not due to any lack of self-reflection. I have intended to write of both these worlds in several genres: poetry, narrative and, of course, diaries. In some ways the interface between these two worlds is immensely complicated, always much more than can be recovered, revealed and understood and much that can never be remembered or written down.

Not taking offence and not giving it also creates and requires many silences in life and depends on a diplomacy that one gets lots of practice at implementing if one is to avoid argument and dissent, an intellectual contradiction to those who would be unifiers of the children of men. If one is not to give offence it is often better that one keep one's real opinions to oneself. If one is not to take offence the avoidance of verbal lance and parry and punitive rebuttals is useful but difficult. Autobiography and its epic nature as expressed in my poetic prose helps me overcome these silences--at least partly. There are many difficult lines to walk in life if those lines are to be useful to others. In writing memoirs the writing of useful lines is also difficult if one is to publish words that are more than dry bones. Not taking and not giving offence, is just one of the more demanding challenges the traveller is faced with obstacles at every turn.

I want to release pent up emotion and give expression to my deepest thoughts but also avoid the dangers in excessive but genuine self-revelation, sometimes called confession. At the same time I want to free myself from my present cotton-wool reality and the potential remoteness of this autobiographical record of mine. This can be done in the context of this new culture of learning, but it is not easy. War-babies and baby-boomers, as well as generations X,Y and Z, all face the challenge of, the encounter with, the spiritual malaise and the disasters of the age. How was one to transmute one’s transitory experience, with its dross of egotism and animus; how was one to refine away through, what Toynbee called some ‘tragic catharsis’(V.3, p.296); how as one to deal with the public catastrophes which overtook society in the 20th and 21st centuries;

DRAWING ON THE THOUGHTS OF SOME OTHER THINKERS

Suffering ceases to be suffering when it has found a meaning wrote Victor Frankl in his now famous book Man’s Search For Meaning. These words of Frankl were quoted by Elizabeth Rochester in her long, fascinating and intellectually stimulating letter to Canadian international pioneers over twenty-five years ago. I think Frankl is partly right; sadly, many never find a meaning to their suffering. Since all of us struggle with suffering, our own and the world’s, in one way or another all our lives, the meaning of the suffering eludes millions. It is important for the generations who are experiencing this new paradigm in its earliest stages to be highly cognizant of the multitude of spiritual verities that previous generations of Bahais, perhaps as many as six if one defines a generation as a twenty-five year period, have come to experience and understand and which stand available in primary and secondary literature as well as on cassette tapes, CDs and videos to help illuminate their paths.

As the philosopher Nietzsche once wrote: lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard. Many of the deeds, much of the history of this Cause over more than a century and a half is coming to light in the years of this new paradigm. It is coming to light in a quite new and relevant context. Finding the relevancy of Bahai history, the Bahai narrative and its metaphorical nature is one of the aims of the millions of interpreters, one of the many goals in the multitude of individual searches and journeys. As this new culture of learning continues in the years ahead knowledge and understanding will multiply many fold. As students of the Cause ponder Bahai texts in their study circles, as they read them in their devotional meetings; as youth, junior youth and children commit some of them to memory; as the institute process translates the understandings gained into action and as Bahai institutions and its agencies take the lead in the many relationships with the wider society, this new paradigm will advance and develop in the decades ahead.

The generations being exposed to this new paradigmatic experience are building on six generations who have been exposed to the lightning and thunder of this new Revelation. Udo Schaefer, quoting from The Dispensation of Bahaullah, writes: "Whatever is latent in the inmost of this holy cycle shall gradually appear and be made manifest, for now is but the beginning of its growth and the dayspring of the evidences of its signs." This new paradigm provides yet another opportunity for the further evidences of this growth. A relevant aphorism here might be: opportunity without capacity produces stress or, if you prefer, capacity without opportunity produces stress. This new paradigm provides everyone with opportunity and each person can channel their capacity, be it a thimble-full or a gallon-measure, into some serving to the Cause, somewhere in this all-encompassing paradigm. Such is my take, my particular way of looking at it, as the 15th year of its operation and gradual implementation is about to open in April 2010.

I remember reading how both Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon, two of my favourite historians, acquired their initial inspiration for what became their life’s magnum opus, their epic: A Study of History in the case of Toynbee and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the case of Gibbon. Epic histories, epic literature and epic journeys had been part of my reading for over forty years by the late 1990s. Epic histories, epic literature and epic journeys are part of the literary culture, the culture of learning of all Baha’is who can read and who take the Baha’i history and its teachings seriously. The Baha’i story, the religious narrative and the vision of this Cause is nothing, if not epic. Much of my writing is and was a hybrid incorporating the social, the physical and biological sciences as well as literature and poetry. My writing gradually developed what I came to see as an epic quality.

My writing and this book has also developed what the historian Polybius emphasized in his Oecumenical History(Book 1 chapter 4): a unity of events. This unity seems to have been imposed upon me by my attempt at a similar unity of composition. There is a single direction and a single goal Polybius wrote in relation to his age and, for me, this is also the case in this modern age, in this paradigm. There is also a divine irony in human affairs, in the daily life of the Bahai community which I cannot ignore. In addition, the Bahai writings have given me an intimation of the divine presence informing my fragment of this mysterious universe. By strenuous intellectual communion and intimate personal intercourse the Bahai writings can communicate a love of beauty and of knowledge like a light caught from a leaping flame(Plato's Letters, No.7). Finally, in listing some of the relevant factors in the production of this work, one can not ignore the role played by the changes and chances of the world and human limitation as well as what might be called those mysterious dispensations of Providence.

In 1997-1998, in the first half of the Four Year Plan(1996-2000), I began to think of writing a personal epic poem and so fashioned some ten pages as a beginning; this particular poem with its ten page beginning is still a work in progress and has not got beyond those ten pages. But by September 2000 I began to envisage my total prose-poetic output in terms of an epic since, by then, I had written several million words of prose-poetry and prose across a number of literary genres. As the efflorescence on Mt Carmel and its tapestry of beauty began to unfold, I felt my writing pregnant with meaning, at least for me if not for others. The sheer size of my epic work in its several genres, it seemed, made the concept of my total oeuvre as epic a natural one. I imposed, then, by sensible and insensible degrees over a period of years, the epithet--epic--on this great swath of my writing as it sat in my computer directory.

In the year 2000, after I had crossed the bridge from that 20th century, I began saying Alla'u'Abha 95 times a day. The enactment of the ritual provisions of the Kitáb-i-Aqdas referring to the obligatory prayers, fasting and dhikr by the House of Justice's announcement to the Bahá'í world on 28 December 1999. This has been, as far as I know, the only enactment made by the Universal House of Justice which I can discern as constituting an act of legislation during the first 15 years of this paradigm. All my days in the 20th century had come and gone and now I was on the internet at thousands of sites and in published books. I was able at last to attract receptive souls to the Cause more than ever before or so it seemed to me as clear as the sun shining in the sky. As the unfolding magnificence of the Terraces began to capture public attention and as a sense of dynamic transformation and a coherence of vision and activity began to give to my mind and heart and their expectations a certain chronology for the future of my own activity---I began to see how I could make my own mark and make it quite specifically in the teaching work and in this new paradigm.

The idea of a paradigmatic shift, a new culture of learning and of growth, had come to take on a whole new meaning for me as the 1990s unfolded, as I crossed that bridge into the new millennium. My writing began to become a medium for teaching in a way it had never done before. The early years of the new millennium and the first two of many decades in the context of this new culture of learning and of systematic action had opened-up new avenues of teaching for this Bahai now in his late adulthood. My writing required the avoidance of distractions and a sense of mission, as the House emphasized in that same 2007 Ridván message; about this there was little doubt in my mind. Deepening had always been synonymous to me, among other things, “with a process of having spiritual meaning infused” into my life. And now that infusion found expression in the written word par excellence, my own written word and its focus was on teaching and consolidation, on the expansion of the Cause and the consolidation of the community I had been involved with in one way or another since the earliest years of my life, my late childhood, the years 9 to 12 years old.

“One of the best medicines,” Daniel Jordan one of the Causes great teachers in the last half century once wrote, “for reducing anxiety is having perceptions which make sense out of all the events going on about us.” I found this circling round, this mental circumambulation process and these comparisons with the works of others did just that; not all anxiety was eliminated, of course; but the work, my work, could go on, in gusto, by leaps and bounds. My learning and writing-time was in seclusion, solitary; it required a deepened aloneness and it found a new clarity. But, given the fact that I was interacting with more people than ever before in a direct teaching capacity in cyberspace and not in real space, as one could put it, I felt that my work was not escapist. My work did take place in a condition of solitariness and solitude, but it also found a social and intellectual intimacy that provided a real source of human happiness. My work also found a source of what might be called internal processes of integration for what had been many disintegrating factors and experiences in my life. Readers who want to follow-up on these disintegrating experiences can read my bipolar story, my chaos narrative as I call it, at this site.

I have often felt in recent years that the burden of value, as that fine writer Anthony Storr puts it in his book Solitude, with which we are at present loading interpersonal relationships is too heavy for those fragile craft to carry. But this is a separate subject too extensive to deal with here. I would recommend readers follow my comment here on Storr's book, on his many analyses of modern society and the nature of the human beings who come across our path in the expanding universe of the Bahai culture of learning and growth.

I began to make comparisons and contrasts with a number of other writers and poets, both ancient and modern, and the epic works that flowed from their pens. I found such exercises useful in order to throw light on the nature, the context and purpose of my own work. As Bahiyyih Nakhjavani emphasized in her writing our “greatness rests not in ourselves, but in our capacity and desire to circle around the great.” In addition to circling round the great souls in our Faith, through prayer and entreaty, through contemplation and reading, I found comparisons and contrasts between my own work and the works of other writers and poets, already acknowledged in the literary world, the social sciences and the humanities, for their significant contributions, provided a fertile base of insight into my own literary endeavours.

I will include here some comparisons and contrasts between my opus and that of some historians and the poetic opus of Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman, although I found William Wordsworth and Shakespeare(or whoever wrote those plays and sonnets) among many others whom I refer to in many of my prose-poems were also helpful by processes of analogical thinking, processes which are valuable tools in life's journey of the intellect. This may sound somewhat pretentious to some readers. Perhaps it is. The value of these comparisons in illuminating my own literary efforts to serve the Cause during these years of a paradigm shift or, perhaps more accurately, a gradualist or even a multi-paradigmatic shift in the life of the Baha’i community and my own life, were extensive, enriching and serendipitous.

The intensity and extent of this new form of action, of teaching the Cause, on a new plane--the internet--has been made possible by the employment of the written word, by an immense variety of methods of expression and varying types of response to the written expressions of others. I no longer had to focus on direct, personal, face-to-face, interaction, although I did not give this up in my many home visits. Necessity or perhaps circumstances, or Providence, had taught me an alternative method of creating works of literary art on the one hand and simple written exchange on the other. This method was more etherial, a criterion of growth in civilizations Toynbee argues, and it seemed to me much more effective: wider in range and deeper in penetration. The influence of soul on soul that I had experience in the years 1959 to 1999 always seemed narrow, superficial and bounded by the confines of the personal and institutional relations through which I was operating. I found, in writing, that my human action was transmuted into perception, thought, feeling and imagination, transcending at the same time the limits of time and space and winning its way into a field that extended to infinity.

I felt compelled, by the turn of the new millennium, in the first decade of the implementation of this new paradigm, to limit my field of action, to change my role, in what might be called practical community affairs due to the infirmities of my bipolar disorder(google: RonPrice BPD) and due also in order that I could focus on a field of action in which, as Lucretius put it, I was able to pass "far beyond the flaming walls of the world and traverse throughout in mind and spirit the immeasurable universe."(Toynbee,V.2, p.289) I participated in these first years of the new paradigm in both an etherial communion with posterity as well as in my short and narrow-verged life of the flesh with its inevitably transitory experience, its dross of egotism and animus. I do not feel I am finding my life by losing it, as some of the more enthusiastic of my coreligionists might put their story. With the poet Shelley I feel no need to "boast of my mighty deeds" if, indeed, any of my deeds are and were mighty.

It is difficult to see my writing as a mighty deed written as it is from the comfort of my home and study and in the leisure of these years of my retirement. I was able to transmute, find relief from, indeed, heal the wounds from what seemed like a lifetime of different kinds of tests and difficulties, different experiences of private and spiritual malaise into works of art, into what might become an ageless and deathless human experience as some of the written words of artists can be. The periodic experiences of malaise in my life-narrative were not characterized by stings of conscience as I looked back from these years of my retirement. Any long range benefits from this writing would be a bonus on top of the present teaching value that my writing has for the Cause.

As I say and I must emphasize, I am not trying to assuage the stings of my conscience due to sins of omission and commission, although perhaps I should, perhaps I do so unconsciously. I find my identity, indeed, I sink my identity day after day into a world of study, writing and thought as I try to transmute into creative thought my energies which had for so many long years been engaged in the practicalities of life. The writings of my religion and of the many thinkers ancient, medieval and modern are like an ambrosia which, in the evening of my life, I feel born to eat, as I try to apply my literary output to the overwhelming experiences, the titanic forces and upheavals, of my age and the panorama of my times.

Time, of course, would tell whether these latter-day literary contributions of my late middle age and these early years of late adulthood would be not just an ephemeral tour de force but, rather, a permanent contribution to knowledge, an everlasting possession, a triumph of spiritual ambition, as was the case of the historian Thucydides' great history of the Peloponnesian War. In the meantime as time decides such an eventuality, I can enjoy the climate of northern Tasmania which, unlike the climate of California, is not too uniformly stimulating and, as the historian Ellsworth Huntington argues in his Civilization and Climate, is sufficiently diverse but not too violently hot or cold as in some of the other places I have lived over the decades.(see pp.225-6)

For many a long year I have come to identify intimately and seriously with the Plans and programs of the Bahai community. Since the close of the Ten Year Crusade this Faith has occupied the centre-piece-stage of my life's trajectory and aspirations. The struggles of this Cause were my struggles although, in recent years, I have come to take a more detached view of the processes. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the challenge of teaching this Cause for several decades without any significant, indeed only a meagre, response in those areas where I lived, have contributed to my taking up the pen in these hours of mental retreat. This, I have little doubt is an appropriate response to the external vicissitudes of my life, my bipolar disorder. It is the best alternative to endless talking and listening which I am unable to take part in any way for more than very short periods of time--less than perhaps two or three hours--without some ensuing exhaustion. Those wanting to know the medical cause of this exhaustion can google, as I say elsewhere in this book: Ron Price, BPD.

In my lifetime the titanic forces unleashed by the revelation of Bahaullah were shaking the world to its depths as they had done in the generation of my parents and grandparents before me. The movement toward a lesser peace was proceeding with a speed that was as fast as it was obscure. When I came to write in these latter years I was able to obtain a marvellous tranquillity and serenity of mind after a peripatetic life filled to overflowing with people, problems and the demands of employment, family and community from wall to psychological wall--and inspite of some of the rigours of my life which I discuss in that detailed googling exercise to which I refer above.

My day to day life has come to possess a regularity and studiousness not unlike Immanuel Kant's(1724-1804). His daily walks and academic routines took him nowhere outside his Prussian town but his thought radiated to the four corners of the earth. In the last ten years my writing has radiated to the many corners of a cyberspace world but my fame is measured in nanoseconds among the 156 million internet sites. This inconspicuous manifestation of my literary work has resulted in more teaching activity than in the previous four decades, 1959 to 1999, of my Bahai life--as I have indicated elsewhere in this book. I feel that I am now serving this Cause more effectively than I have in all the other more active parts of my life and, due to the infirmities of my body, it is unlikely that I will be sucked into the turmoil of practical affairs from which I have been extricated now for more than a decade.

Like the poet Dante(1265-1321) who was driven to withdraw from his native city, who experienced many problems in love and life and who wrote his lifework--the Divina Commedia--in the last seven years of his life, I too have withdrawn but in a different way than Dante did. My hopes for the world and my society have not been extinguished as Dante's were, but both he and I were freed to engage in our literary work, freed from the trammels of time and space. In his case that freedom resulted in his ageless and timeless masterpiece and, in my case, my new found freedom brought more literary work in the teaching field than I ever could have imagined at the outset of this new paradigm when the growth of websites on the planet was just beginning. It brought a spiritual voyage into my innermost thoughts in order to return to my community with a series of writings which were seeds for a teaching and consolidation activity, a new form of community service and social activism, beyond my highest hopes at earlier stages in my life.

Unlike the poet Ezra Pound’s epic poem Cantos which had its embryo as a prospective work as early as 1904, but did not find any concrete and published form until 1917, my poetry by 2000 had come to be defined as epic, firstly in retrospect as I gradually came to see my individual prose-poetic pieces as parts of one immense epic opus; and secondly in prospect by the inclusion, as the years went by, of all future prose-poetic and prose efforts. Such was the way I came increasingly to see my literary anchorage in epic form, sometimes in subtle and sometimes in quite specific and overt degrees of understanding and clarity from 1997 to 2000 just as this paradigmatic shift was beginning to take off in the Baha’i community as the last years of the twentieth century came to a close and the new millennium was on the horizon.

MY WRITING AS EPIC

This concept of my work as epic, with the gift of good and industrious hours, began, then, in 1997, after seventeen years(1980-1997) of writing and recording my poetic output and after five years(1992-1997) of an intense poetic production of over 500 pieces per annum coming out of my poem factory. The beginning of this quite intense period of poetic production synchronized with that “auspicious juncture in the history” of the Cause, the Holy Year of 1992/3, when that “rampant force,” that “quickening wind,” that “ventilation of modes of thought” and that encouragement to take time for inner reflection and for a rendezvous of our soul with the Source of our light and life” was on our radar screens, so to speak, due to the Ridván message that year. We were all informed on 21 April 1992 that the Universal House of Justice would “not forget to supplicate at the Holy Threshold” in order that the Blessed Beauty “from His retreat of deathless splendour” might fill our souls with His “revivifying breath.” I liked this idea; of course one can never be sure that what is filling our souls is His reifying breath or the many idle fancies and vain imaginations that abound in our society and fill our minds to overflowing with trivia, the allurements of immense insignificance and what the Bahai literary critic Geoffrey Nash once called the candy-floss entertainment world suited for ten year olds.

In 1997 after five years and some 2500 prose-poems sitting in my computer directory and in plastic booklets with crenelated tubes for bindings, this epic work began to take on form. What I had written between 1992 and 1997 dealt with a pioneering life of thirty-five years, a Baha’i life of thirty-eight years and an additional six years when my association with the Baha’i Faith was due to my mother’s interest, when I was still a child and junior youth. In those early years in the 1950s, this new Faith was seen more as a Movement in the public eye than a world religion in spite of the Guardian’s efforts to dispel this anachronistic, inaccurate, view. That earlier emerging paradigm was, in 1953, at about the same stage as this current paradigm shift was in 1996.

In December 1999, just after retiring from full-time employment, I forwarded my 38th booklet of poetry to the Baha’i World Centre Library(BWCL). The BWCL had 38 booklets of poetry for each year of my pioneering venture, 1962-1999. I entitled that 38th booklet Epic. I continued to send my poetry to the BWCL until 30 December 2000. By the time of the official opening of the Terraces of the Shrine of the Bab on 21 May 2001 I had sent over 5000 poems to the BWCL. Perhaps this exercise of sending out my poetry to the BWCL, among other libraries in the Baha’i world, was part of a desire for some connective tissue to be threaded into the warp & welf of the literary work of this international pioneer. Perhaps I felt my poetry, which had had a transforming affect on the animate and inanimate features of my homefront, international and changing pioneer life, needed to have other homes, other kindred spaces, beside my own head. The affective kernel or centre of my life was Mt. Carmel, the Hill of God, the Terraces and the Arc which were just being completed. This Place had been the cynosure of my life for my entire adulthood. Was it unreasonable that I wanted my poetry to be in the library in Haifa? Perhaps. Perhaps it was sheer presumption.

Did my writings deserve a place beside whose of the Central Figures of my Faith? Recognition of this Revelation is not and has not been an easy matter for the majority who here of it for the first time, at least this is the case in Western countries and in Canada and Australia where I have lived for over sixty years. If most of those to whom I have tried to teach this Faith since the 1950s probably regarded the Bahai writings(if they were ever to get so far as to actually read them)as strange, queer, flowery, typically oriental, far too poetic and unsuitable for the West; if the language of our time, the language that fills magazines, newspapers and most novels is impoverished and emotively undernourished, in some ways it is not surprising that most of my contemporaries in Canada and Australia had difficulty coming near to this Cause. And there were many other reasons. The recognition of truth is often associated with a series of requirements which demand quite a bit from everyday man. Would my writing make it any easier? All of this, of course, is essentially tangential, to the focus of this book and I shall leave these complex questions and these subjective statements about the Bahai writings, which I hope do not offend some of my coreligionists, unanswered for now.

This lengthening work of my poetry and prose, which I now refer to as epic, evinces a pride, indeed, a veneration for the historical and cultural past of this new Faith. This history provides me with a metaphorical, mythological, base of meaning in my life. A significant part of my confidence and hope, my vision for the future of humanity, derives from the history and the teachings of a religion which I believe has an immensely important role to play in the unfolding application of the principle of the political and religious unification of the globe to human welfare in what is, has been and will be, a long and tortuous planetization process.

ONE’S SCHOLARLY WORK
DOES NOT HAVE TO JUSTIFY ITSELF

There is also a practical use of my writing to local, quite personal and private associations that I give expression to in this work of poetry and prose. This work may turn out to be yet one more of the many means that currently exist, I sometimes mused as I wrote, of putting youth and adults in this new Cause in touch with the great citizens, the models and the noble deeds of the past, inspiring them with more personal, more succinct, blends of the historical, psychological and sociological aspects of their religious heritage as Baha’is. However local my efforts were, though, the core of my inspiration, both in my writing and in the derivation of my religious enthusiasms, found their origins in a spiritual, an international, perspective. I did not measure the viability and significance of my writing, my literary work, by its local reception. Nor did I measure it entirely by its teaching and consolidation function. As Paul Lample point out in his talk on 'Learning and the Unfoldment of the Bahá'í Community' in 2008 one's "scholarly work does not have to justify itself on the basis of whether it contributes to the current goals of the Five Year Plan. It is valid in its own right; it is an area of endeavour in which we have to engage."

The local strength of the Cause wherever I had lived in some 35 houses and 22 towns in my life was, for the most part, not a visible one in either the public eye or the eye of many of my fellow believers. I did not measure the religion I belonged to, what was still considered by many to be but a new religious movement, by its local strength and reception. “The bona vide context of this Cause,” as Will van den Hoonaard put it in the last sentence of his survey of the first fifty years of Baha’i history in Canada, is provided by “the advent of instant travel and international communication.” The fundamental context of the Bahai Faith is international; it is the axis of the oneness of humanity. As I have been writing in the last twenty years, I often felt as if I was there in Haifa at the Bahai World Centre. This was especially true thanks to cinema, video, DVD, cassette-tape, CD, photography, hi-fidelity sound systems, a print and electronic media which had been sensibly and insensibly transforming the world into a neighbourhood before my very eyes in the last half of the 20th century and in this new millennium. Indeed, much of history and life in contemporary society, its content and context, were being restored, recreated, illumined and revitalized before my intellectual eyes. The Tablet of Carmel itself is full of allusions, symbols and metaphors which enrich and enhance the meaning systems of the individuals in the Bahai community everywhere. I had been trying to memorize this Tablet for over twenty-five years and many of its sentences and passages had become a part of my inner life. But again, these comments are somewhat tangential to the thrust of this book.

While millions upon millions were “ill-equipped to interpret the social commotion at play throughout the planet, “ as they listened to “the pundits of error” and sank “deeper into a slough of despond,” I felt inspired by a vision, a culture of learning and a sense of authentic guidance all of which propelled what I felt was a constructive literary endeavour. Not having to do battle with the phantoms of a wrongly informed imagination and their troubled forecasts of doom, I was able to proceed with unabated action to make my mark at this crucial turning point in history. This is not to say, of course, that I see the solutions to the world's problems as simple and that I have an angle on the world's complexities which puts me in an all-knowing position. I am more than a little aware that we all only understand in part and prophesy in even lesser part. Human consciousness is simply inadequate to fathom the world's complexity.

The disproportion between the complexity and our inadequate consciousness is becoming more and more flagrant. Human experience and reason, without an orienting aid for human behaviour and existential questions, is no longer a sure guide to social relations. These relations are simply so complex, so differentiated and human experience so specialized, complicated or incomprehensible that it is very difficult to find common symbols to relate one experience to another. Part of the function of this new paradigm is to provide another stage in the orienting structure that is the Bahai community. Udo Schaefer explores this theme and the spiritual bankruptcy of democracy very effectively in his book the Imperishable Dominion. It is crucial, but quite a complex exercise, to keep these ideas in mind as we go about our experience of this new paradigm of growth in the Bahai community. Little by little and day by day is an aphorism we all need to keep squarely in front of our intellectual perspectives, in front of our eyes and in our minds to counter the immense complexity of it all and to help us keep our noes to the proverbial grindstone with the joy that is essential and that we need if we are to keep us going day after day and year after year.

MY PARADIGM SHIFT
AND THE COMMUNITY PARADIGM SHIFT

My writing journey in this last dozen years has coincided with a process, a paradigm shift, that was taking place in the religion I had belonged to for decades. This writing journey of mine has been, and I anticipate it continuing to be, an activity that I trust is helping to create memorials and monuments with an international ethos. Perhaps, I sometimes muse, these prose-poems possess a resolution, a perspective, a vision that might be indispensable to others in performing the duties of a type of global citizen of the future. Perhaps this literary work will also serve, so my musings continue, as a dedication, as a form of natural piety, not so much my own, but a dedication and a piety by which the present would become spiritually linked with the past in the minds of others who read what I wrote.

I liked to see my work as an extension into the sphere of nationhood and even internationalism. Wordsworth saw his autobiographical poetry this way. His poetry was part and parcel of his desire for continuity in his own life and in the lives of others— "The Child is father of the Man; / And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety." In writing it is useful to have some overriding ethos, some structure of purpose and meaning, some explicit intention and definition of ultimate concern. Rollo May calls the totality of a person's orientation to the world--intentionality. We mould and remould our world in the process and this is done, he argues, in the context of meaning and commitment. This new paradigm is nothing if not yet another form of Bahai commitment, the structure within which willing and wishing take place. Intention is a turning of one's intention toward something. And language is my way of conceiving it--hence this book which gives expression to my potentialities and indeed my very consciousness.

The man who governs his life by consciousness, by the use of the rational faculty and the cultural attainments of the mind has a completeness, writes Leach, and he can powerfully assist others. This has certainly been the case for me in the years of this new paradigm. But not everywhere and with everyone. One must accept one's limitations and in my case they are many and various. But I am the private artist with a public function. All is not seriousness; there is also frivolity and play on the internet; indeed, it is just about compulsory in many places. There is also a need for accuracy and being methodical, persistence and continuity in so many discussions which seem to never end. The internet is a flowing fibre of teaching opportunities.

INCREASING OUTREACH OF THE BAHAI COMMUNITY

As this new Cause has grown and matured in the more than a century and a half since 1844, there has been an integrated, organic, a humanistic outreach as it went about affirming in many ways, in its social and spiritual teachings, the continuity, the progression of past, present and future. In the many countries and the multitude of groups where Baha’is have played their parts as individuals and as communities, they eschewed militarism, imperialism and aggressiveness in the world around them. They went about celebrating and commemorating the cultural, national, international and individual achievements of members of their Faith and of the groups and individuals of whatever background and description they were a part. This is not to say, of course, that harsh words never arose among all the millions of Baha’is, nor that violence and abuse did not erupt from time to time in the myriad of relationships that constituted the Baha’i community.

As Baha’u’llah emphasized on the first page of his Book of Certitude, though, one must not, indeed cannot, measure this Cause by the behaviour of its adherents. Again, I have made this point before in this book, but I make it again due to its cruciality in this whole process. Baha’is aim and try but do not always achieve; inharmony and misunderstandings are part and parcel of any group of people, any paradigm.

In order to maintain and foster their identity and independence as well as their international spirit of solidarity, Baha’is have tried to sink deep into the recesses of the hearts and minds of others—for this aspect of their daily life, this intention in their interpersonal relationships, is and has been part of their ethic and ethos. This process has taken many forms. But, one cannot have deep and meaningful relationships with everyone; a certain degree of anonymity is essential in a modern mass society or our spirits would burn up in a short time. For me, one of these forms of both intimacy and anonymity has been this literary work and since 1997 I have defined this literary form, my work, as epic. The whole notion of community building and what it means to have community has just begun within the period of this new paradigmatic shift, this new culture of learning and, coincidentally, with the origin an growth of my epic literary opus. I am only commenting on this concept of community in this part of my book as a tangential part of the overall theme. But I would like to say more about my writing for it is this which has been at the core of my own paradigm shift, a shift that has been the crucial enabling factor in my own teaching work virtually all over the planet where people have access to the internet.

EZRA POUND

I had begun then, as I say above, to see all of my poetry and prose somewhat like Pound’s Cantos which drew on a massive body of print or analects, a word which means literary gleanings: a sequence of chapters, poems, pieces of prose-poetry, essays, interviews and books often completely at random but not always so, with themes of adjacent items completely unrelated to each other, again, but not always so. Some central themes recur repeatedly in different parts of my total work, sometimes in exactly the same wording and sometimes with small variations, as they do in Pound’s work. Just as many central themes that had been part of my life for decades as a Bahá’í, recurred repeatedly in the new culture of learning of the Bahá’í community, sometimes with exactly the same words and sometimes with only small variations, so was this true in my writing, my memoir, my autobiography. And it always remains unfinished. And so is this true of the expression in the world of concrete reality of this new paradigm---it is always a work in progress. Indeed, it is a cumulative progress in both its outward and inward aspect. This is its growth, its expansion.

In the main the challenges within this new paradigm do not impinge from the outside but they arise from within and the victorious responses to these challenges do not take the form so much of surmounting external obstacles or adversaries, but they are to be found, they manifest themselves, in actions related to an inward self-articulation, self-determination. It is here where the criterion for growth is found. This is also true of the individuals. Their creative acts are an expression of their inward development from inchoate activity, from various forms of frenetic passivity, psychic anarchy and unorganized centrifugal tendencies to effective, psychic order and central control.

As it says in John xii, 32, in the process of this creativity they “draw men unto them” and “this is why they have come into the world.”(John xvi, 28) Living lives for remote and mighty ends is part of the life of people in this new Baha’i paradigm as it was in the old. There is always the inert uncreative and unresponsive mass of one’s kin and one’s kind even if one enjoys the companionship of a few kindred spirits. The majority of the members of society at this stage are inevitably left behind.

The Cantos, the longest poem in modern history, over eight hundred pages and, in its current and published form, written between 1922 to 1962, is, as I say, a great mass of literary gleanings. So is this true of the great mass of my poetry, prose and prose-poetry. The initial concept of my poetry as epic, though, came long after I was first influenced by poetry, long after I began writing poetry as far back as the winter of 1980 when I kept my first poem in a file, possibly as far back as 1962 at the very start of my pioneering life when I first remember writing poetry and possibly all the way back to the 1950s when I joined the Baha’i Faith and when in 1953 my mother, also a poet, became a Baha’i. The view, the concept of my work as epic began, as I have indicated, as a partly retrospective exercise and partly a prospective one.

MY EPIC JOURNEY

The epic journey that was and is at the base of my poetic opus, then, is not only a personal one of fifty-eight years going back to 1953, the time when my first steps in the realms of this new faith-belief took place; and the time when my firmer belief, commitment and reflection came along in my lifespan by the early 1960s. My epic literary road was and is also the journey of this new System, the World Order of Bahá’u’lláh, which had its origins as far back as the 1840s and, if one includes the two precursors to this System, as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century when many of the revolutions and forces that are at the beginning of modern history find their origin: the American and French revolutions, the industrial and agricultural revolutions and the revolution in the arts and sciences.

Generally, the goal or aim of my work and the way my narrative imagination is engaged in this epic is to attempt to connect this long and complex history to my own life and the lives of my contemporaries, as far as possible. I have sought and found a narrative voice that contains uncertainty, ambiguity and incompleteness among shifting fields of reference mixed with certainties of heart and spirit. Since this poetry is inspired by so much that is, and has been, part of the human condition, this epic seems to me centred in Life Itself and the most natural and universal of human activities, the act of creating narratives as well as, as the great historian of the Renaissance Jacob Burkhardt put it: “man suffering, striving, doing, as he is and was and ever shall be.”

EACH OF US HAS THEIR OWN STORY

My prose and poetry, my epic, my religion and my society, are all engaged in an epic adventure, a crisis, a process, of epic magnitude that has to do with heroism and deeds in battle of contemporary and historical significance and manifestation. If we each want to be in contact with, in touch with, our reality, any reality we need to understand its purpose. This is what will infuse our own, our personal, epic narrative, with meaning and help us in this time of crisis, this climacteric in society. As Mr H.G. Wells divined by intuition at the turn of the 20th century Western Civilization was rushing down a steep place into the sea. At the turn of the 21st it appears to be nearly in the sea. We are indeed, in one of those ‘Times of Troubles’ as the historian Toynbee called them. They often last for centuries and they precede a Universal State.(A Study of History, V.4, p.4)

My work and my life, the belief System I have been associated with for over half a century, involves a great journey, not only my own across two continents, but that of this Cause I have been identified with as it has expanded across the planet in my lifetime, in the second century of its history. Sometimes that journey is lived in solidarity and sometimes in a solitary, alone, state, keeping one's distance from events, maintaining the peace of mind necessary for listening to one's deeper self. Though opposites, solidarity and solitude are part of this new paradigm as they always have been part of the Bahai life since the first paradigm shift on 23 May 1844.

This journey also involves my society and its new historical and social context in my time, my four epochs over the post-war years and into this new millennium as well as the emergence in recent decades, if not centuries, of a very complex set of moral ideas some conceived against custom and vested interests with no commonality, just by individuals with their own mythogenic private zone. Some of these ideas reinforce a sub-group of traditional religious and moral interests; some of them are part of the new definers of social reality in the electronic media; and some have a strong base among a very wide range of interest groups, idea systems, meanings and individual behaviours.

This journey of mine and its commitment must accept that along the way I may often be wrong; I may often do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing. There is a crucial dialectic between certitude and its sense of absolute conviction and perplexity and doubt. There is also a profound joy in the realization that one is helping to form the very structure of a new world. As I have gone about writing this book in recent years, and writing my autobiography in the last quarter century, I sense some inexplicable divine spark which has been kindled into flame. The stars in their courses cannot defeat the achievement of the vision of this Faith I have been associated with for nearly 60 years. I trust my efforts will contribute their small part to the attainment of the goal of the human endeavours of my coreligionists.(The Bible, Judges, v, 20)

The epic convention of the active intervention of God and holy souls from another world; and the convention of an epic tale, told in verse, a verse that is not a frill or an ornament, but is essential to the story, is found here in my rendition of this Baha’i epic. I think there is an amplitude in this poetry that simple information lacks; there is also an engine of action that is found in my inner life as much, if not more, than in my external story. In some ways, this is the most significant aspect of my work, at least from my point of view. Indeed, if I am to make my mark at this crucial point of history, it will be largely in the form of this epic literary work which tells of nearly 50 years of pioneering: 1962-2011 and a pre-pioneering decade that constituted most of the Ten Year Crusade: 1953-1963. The mark each of us makes finds its origins in our inner life and private character and the extent to which they mirror the teachings of this new Faith. This is the only mirror and mark worth making. In some ways we are only too well aware of the quality of our inner life and in other ways we are often blind to its reality.

MAKING ONE'S MARK-PLAYING ONE'S PART

More importantly, though, the part I play, the mark I leave, is as an individual thread in the fabric and texture of the Baha’i community in its role as a society-building power. This is true for all Baha’is as they attempt to find their place, to weave their thread, to define their role in the overall texture and substance that is this emerging world Order. The larger epic, the meta-epic, around which the epic of my life, indeed all our lives, is centred, finds its strength in the authenticity of the interpretation and exemplification of a religious canon. And each of us has his or her own epic, our own marathon journey, for many decades of living. For this life, this living, is indeed a marathon, at this climacteric of history, the last stage, the tenth stage as Shoghi Effendi called it in 1953-—and it is all within the context of the legitimate interpretation of the Baha’i canon and its authenticity. It is also part of the context, now, of a new culture of learning, a new paradigm shift in Baha’i community life.

The Bahá’í Administrative Order is something all Baha’is play a part in on a multitude of fronts “whether in serving it or receiving from it.” In their efforts to practice the teachings and be living examples all Baha’is are part of this new Order and this “moral aspect cannot be over-emphasized.” This Order should not be characterized by a membership which resembles a passive congregational community nor should it be one with only a lip-service to lofty principles. Decision-making is by a group, a consultative based system and is not the prerogative of learned or ambitious individuals; and this process requires for its success the skills and principles outlined by Abdu’l-Baha and Shoghi Effendi. They are skills and principles not easy to acquire and apply. They often require a brilliant inventiveness, keen perception and discrimination and a high order of intelligence. They require encounter and absorption. In many ways the Baha’i method is the antithesis of how current political and religious communities are organized and run with their hierarchical, patriarchal and authoritarian practices. Encounter and absorption, engagement and intensity can be found in various degrees, manners and styles of commitment. The process requires all we have and, in this work, not only do we encounter our world, but we prepare our souls for the world of light beyond this nether sphere.

As the Universal House of Justice announced, as far back as 1975, the process of building the Arc on Mount Carmel “will synchronize with two no less significant developments-the establishment of the Lesser Peace and the evolution of Bahá'í national and local institutions.'' These institutions, these places of group-decision making and increasingly refined consultative skills are one of the critical places in which this culture of learning will manifest itself in the decades and centuries ahead—and this community building process has just begun, has just taken off in our time. These processes are often slow and obscure in their manifestations. The processes involved in the Lesser Peace also have their critical domains where equally slow and often equally obscure processes of development are taking place.

My own life, my own epic, within this larger Baha’i epic, had its embryonic phase in the first stage of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s Divine Plan, 1937-1944, the first of three phases leading to the election of the Universal House of Justice in 1963 as the last year of my teen age life was about to begin and as, most importantly, the fulfilment of the prophecy of Daniel regarding “that blissful consummation” when Divine Light shall flood the world from the East to the West. Little did I know, of course, at the time. That is often the case that we simply have no idea just where we are in the great process that is history. We come to understand ourselves and our world retrospectively.

In 1963 “a unique victory” was won and that victory has been consolidated in the years since then. A process of consolidation has also gone on during what is now nearly half a century(1963 to 2013) and this consolidation has been especially apparent during these paradigmatic years of this new culture of learning. It is a consolidation of what the German sociologist Max Weber called an institutionalization of charisma, a term he used as part of his sociology of religion that he developed in the years before the Great War to end all wars. This unique victory is part of this new epic journey: for me, for the Baha’i community and for humankind.

It is hardly surprising that the Administrative Order is described as a theocracy. It is after all the internal order governing a religious community. If theocracy is defined as rule by the institutions of the religious order, any self-governing religious order is by definition theocratic. The Methodists and Quakers are internally theocratic in this sense, since they hope and have faith that the church, as part of the body of Christ, will be guided (through its elected system) by God. This is not the same as ‘theocracy’ in the political sense, which is the kind of government that was attempted in Iran after 1979, a government in which the persons and institutions of the religious order either control or replace the organs of the civil government. In this, which is the usual sense of ‘theocracy,’ the Bahai teachings are decidedly anti-theocratic, since they forbid and condemn this usurpation of the power that God has granted to the Kings and Rulers. Still, it is not the purpose of this book to deal with the complexities of the form of governance in the centuries ahead from a Bahai perspective. As Shoghi Effendi so eloquently put it on the last page of his The Promised Day Is Come: "Not ours, puny mortals that we are, to attempt to arrive at a precise and satisfactory understanding of the steps which must lead a bleeding humanity.....from its calvary to its ultimate resurrection.

THE TEMPEST

A tempest seems to have been blowing across the world's several continents and its billions of inhabitants with an incredible force for decades, for over a century and since the emergence of this latest paradigmatic variant on one long Bahai paradigm, the tempest has been blowing with increasing force yet again, a force much more complex than the one that brought two world wars. It is a force that is now raging in every corner of the world even where people seemingly live in peace and comfort. I would hope that this literary construction and analysis of what I see as an epic community design that has been put in place over the last 15 years, will be of use to others as this tempest continues to blow.

Indeed this tempest is showing no signs of cessation. I would like to think that what I write here will help others translate their potentiality into actuality--a process that Alfred North Whitehead called concrescence. Whitehead also said that each of us is engaged in a process of shaping the welter and often chaotic experience of our thought and emotion into "a consistent pattern of feelings." But I have no idea whether what I write will be of help to others or not. In this exercise of mine I am quite aware that there are no guarantees for myself or for others. One writes in faith and hope. One provides the energy and one follows the guidance available in this Cause, as far as one is able within the limits of ones incapacity as Abdul-Baha once expressed the concept of one’s failings to act and to do. And consistency of feeling is a lifelong battle and consistency is achieved only in the context of inconsistency. My capacity, our capacity, to experience our world is what Whitehead calls "feeling" and it is these feelings--and thoughts--which I must shape into a pattern that increases my awareness and the effectiveness of my participation in this new paradigm which will be with me--and us--for the rest of our lives.

I want to express beauty in addition to wholeness, a different kind of beauty than the painter or musician, to achieve a symmetry by means of infinite literary chords and discords, showing all the traces of the mind’s passage through the world; and to achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering and many coloured fragments. The wholeness comes from putting events into words. This is for me a natural enough process but, however natural, this type of literary flight of the mind is not so easily achieved. It is a worthy and difficult objective to attain, not unlike a literary aim of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers Virginia Woolf who held the view that “in much of our conscious life we are separated from reality because we are surrounded by a protective covering of appearances, of cotton wool.” Her aim was not so much to tell a coherent story but to convey moments of being, an aim that developed right from the memoir that was her first piece of writing in 1908. Her greatest pleasure, she said, was to put the severed parts of her life together on paper, in words. To Virginia Woolf, and to me, we are these words, this work of literary art. These words are the result of our living and acting in community. And so is this true of all of us not just those like Virginia Woolf and I, both of whom have a bipolar disorder. Each in our own way, as we all go through this culture of learning: we try to put our life together in this complex world, this age of transition, these darkest hours before the dawn.

I trust, too, that my epic work is not only a sanctimonious, openly pious, exploration of literary, practical and life-narrative themes, but also and simultaneously a self-questioning of these themes and forms, actions and motivations. What I write should not be seen as fixed and final, but what has been a lifelong attempt to polish and not pontificate, a work in progress that tries to guard against blind and idle imitation as well as against narrowness, rigidity and intolerance--tendencies toward fundamentalist habits of mind--in my own spiritual path and in the paths of others. What I write reveals some of the decisive moments in my life, moments in my inner world, moments which were, and usually remain, private. Some of the decisive moments in my society and my religion are also surveyed but not in any detail since: (a) they can be found described elsewhere in books that now fill many a space in libraries and great quantities of cyberspace and (b) the focus of this book is not, in the main, my autobiography, although some of it is found here.

OTHER THINKERS AND WRITERS

From time to time in this book I make a special reference, a special drawing, on the thoughts and writings of others. The first here is Hugh Kenner.

ELSEWHERE COMMUNITIES
In 1997 Hugh Kenner(1923-2003), a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor. gave the annual Massey Lecture in Canada. Kenner pointed out that the greatest paradigm shift in Western Civilization in the last thousand years has been from a Eurocentric, Christocentric, tradition centred, civilization to a gradually evolving global civilization with no special political and moral centre in a universe of infinite space and time. It is this phenomenon, this shift, that the following poem tries to speak to, of, about. For in some ways the shift the Baha’i community is going through could be said to be yet another part of this greater shift, one of the many paradigm shifts in what has been the dynamic, complex and changing nature of the Baha’i community and its history.

I have my own Grand Tour now,(1)
my elsewhere community,(2)
my journey through what I know
to what I have yet to learn;
and when the war is over
I will go home.
There are no more Colosseums
or Roman Forums & education
takes me down different paths
past other Alps, another Paris,
some other Channel en route to
my salvation & the praise of my
Lord---& finding out who I am,
Some absorption to make me…
someone else, discover impulses
of deeper birth which come to me
in solitude. The harvest of a quiet
eye, random truths around me lie.
In these verses I impart what broods
and sleeps what in my own heart and
mind still keeps.

In the meadows of His nearness
I try to roam to get some clearness.
For the Grand Tour is my own creation
and can’t be found on any tourist guide,
only in my own world where I now abide.

(1) In the eighteenth century the Grand Tour was the trip from some place in western civilization through Europe to Rome. This is no longer the Grand Tour. We all make our own now.
(2) We all have what Hugh Kenner calls ‘elsewhere communities’, places we travel to and things we do and think to find out who we are. The traveller absorbs this ‘elsewhere community’ into himself to become what defines him throughout life. Part of this new paradigm in the Baha’i community is this elsewhere community, a community the Baha’i defines himself in by being immersed, as far as he is able, in the community of the Greatest Name.

MORE ON EZRA POUND

I discuss in the following paragraphs some of the poet Ezra Pound(1885-1972) an American expatriate poet and critic, and a major figure in the early modernist movement. This controversial figure and author of the longest epic poem of the twentieth century was intent on developing an ideal polity for the mind of man. This polity flooded his consciousness and suggested the menacing fluidity, the indiscriminate massiveness, of the crowd, the mass of humankind. The polity that is imbeded in my own epic does not suggest the crowd, probably because the polity I have been working with over my lifetime, over some four epochs of the Baha’i Faith’s Formative Age, has been one that has grown so slowly at the local level where my efforts have taken place and where the groups I have worked in and with have been small.

At the same time, and over these four epochs(1944 to 2012) I have become more and more impressed with what is for me this “ideal polity." It is a global polity that is slowly spreading to every section of the world. As my experience of the Bahai polity and the Baha’i polity itself became more seasoned, more mature, more developed, it has come to "flood my consciousness" as the decades have seen my lifespan head into late adulthood. I could expatiate on this System and how it deals with the essential weaknesses of politics, weaknesses pointed out so long ago by Plato and Aristotle and which continue in their myriad forms to this day. That is not the purpose of this book, although I have expatiated on the subject matter of this polity: (i) occasionally as a crucial part of the content of this culture of learning, and (ii) a great deal in my poetry.

As the “series of soul-stirring events” that celebrated the completion of the Terraces on Mount Carmel were coming to their climax in the 1990s, that ideal polity of mind that I referred to above experienced a new, a fresh impetus, what might be called a type of spiritual springtime of auspicious beginnings. They were beginnings that went back as far as the early 1980s when the permanent seat of the Universal House of Justice on what Bahais call the Mountain of the Lord was completed and the occupation of the International Teaching Centre and the Centre for the Study of the Texts took place. A creative drive, a revolutionary vision, a systematic effort were all part of a culture of learning which was emerging in the 1980s and it implied the slow emergence of that paradigmatic shift that was foreshadowed by the House of Justice, as I say above, as early as 1988. This shift became a more visible reality as the 1990s turned the corner into the new millennium.

My style, my prose-poetic design, is like Pound’s in so far as I use juxtaposition, history and much in the western intellectual tradition as a way to locate and enhance meanings. Like Pound, I stress continuity in history, the cultural and the personal. At the heart of epic poetry for Pound was “the historical.” It was part of the reclaiming job that Modernist poets saw as their task, to regain ground from the novelists; my reclaiming job is to tell of the history of the epochs I have lived through from a personal perspective, from the perspective of the multitude of traces both I and my coreligionists have left behind. This reclaiming process, I must emphasize, is a personal one. In many ways the events of my time don’t need reclaiming for the major and minor events of these epochs both within and without the Baha’i community are massively documented in more detail than ever before in history. The reclaiming process is one of seeing the meaning in the evening of my life of what happened in my personal life, my society and my religion in the earlier decades of my lifespan.

Perhaps, though, in the same way that Pound’s work was, as the poet Alan Ginsberg once expressed and defined Pound’s work, “the first articulate record and graph of a man’s mind and emotions over a continuous fifty year period,” my epic may provide a similar record and graph. Unlike Pound, though, I see new and revolutionary change in both the historical process, in my own world and in the future with a distant vision of the oneness of humanity growing in the womb of this travailing age. I see humankind on a spiritual journey, the stages of which are marked by the advent of two Manifestations of God in the 19th century, at one of history’s many climacterics. The nature of the universe, it seems to me, points to something deeper and beyond itself. The universe has, as the philosopher and statesman J. C. Smuts once wrote, “a trend, a list. It was an immanent Telos. It is making for some greater whole.”(Holism and Evolution, 1927, p.185)

My “articulate record” is so different than Pound’s both in process and content. The contrast with Pound is worth stating for it throws light on what I am attempting to do. Pound’s world, like Woolf’s, was “all in scraps and fragments” and he attempted in his Cantos, that longest poem to which I referred to above, what some see as quintessentially an autobiography, to document the uncongeniality, the conflict, of the modern world. All that is and was solid, as Marx said, had melted into air by the decades that both Woolf and Pound were writing and all that was holy had been profaned. It was then, in these decades, that the new Baha’i paradigm of non-partisan politics, of its Bahai Administration, the nucleus and pattern of a new Order found its embryonic form.

That melting, that dissolving, process of the old order continued into my time. Individuals tied too closely to that old order were and are being rolled up as a new order is being spread out in a process of parturition and rupture that is often subliminal and with an imminence of a new bloom as history goes on in its “disastrous quest for meaning.” The centre had, indeed, not held or, as Frederick Glaysher states for “it had never really existed; it was only a fallacious structuring principle.” But a new centre of the holy had clearly emerged in my time even if it had just stuck its head above the ground and even if it was recognized by only one thousandth of the human population of this planet. It is this authentic structuring principle, this new centre and a sense of the holy associated with it that informs this autobiographical work and informs the work and activity of Baha’is at this new stage of this paradigmatic process.

The fifty year period, 1963 to 2013, in which my life and my Faith has been guided by the first full institutionalization of the charismatic Force that had come into the world a century before in the person of Bahá’u’lláh, has been one of the most enriching periods in the history of this Cause. This Cause had always been, for me, a culture of learning. I had for many a long year taken “deep satisfaction from the advances of society” and “had seen in them the very purpose of God.” These things, too, had been part of the culture of learning that had been in my life since the 1950s with the Guardian always providing the exegesis, the light of interpretation, that was a recipe for action, for understanding and meaning in my life—and then, after 1963, with the House of Justice providing a continuance of this divine and infallible exegesis.

WALT WHITMAN

To turn to another poet, Walt Whitman(1819-1892), an American poet, essayist and journalist, let me make some more comparisons and contrasts that hopefully will illumine my epic work and the epic work we are all involved with in this new global religion. Those who are familiar with Whitman’s poem Leaves of Grass may recall that his poetic work attempts to merge both the writer and his poetry with the reader. In the same way that Pound’s work provides a useful comparison and contrast point for me in describing and analysing my epic, so is this true of Walt Whitman’s poem. His poem expresses the theory and practice of democracy; mine expresses quite a different polity: the theory and practice of a new Order, a new System, what some call a democratic theocracy. I try to merge myself with the reader but, I am more inclined to the view that, like Pound, I do not achieve this desirable goal. In my case it is for different reasons than Pound, reasons which would require too extensive an explanation to go into here.

Whitman’s poem is, among other things, an embodiment of the idea that a single unique protagonist can represent a whole epoch. This protagonist can be looked at in two ways. There is his civic, public, side and his private, intimate side. While I feel it would be presumptuous of me to claim, or even attempt, to represent an entire epoch or age, this concept of a private/public dichotomy is a useful one, a handy underlying feature or idea at the base of this epic poem. Learning as a mode of operation requires, as the House of Justice emphasizes again and again, "that all assume a posture of humility, a condition in which one becomes forgetful of self, placing complete trust in God, reliant on His all-sustaining power and confident in His unfailing assistance, knowing that He, and He alone, can change the gnat into an eagle, the drop into a boundless sea."

I also like to think that, as I have indicated above, this experience, this poetry, this epic work, is in some ways part and parcel of the experience of many of my coreligionists around the world as their experience is part of mine, even though my work has an obvious focus on my own experience; and their lives and activities have an obvious focus on them. Paradoxically, it is the personal which is the common in so far as it recognizes the existence of the many in the one. In my own joy or despair and in and through this epic work entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs I express a shared experience; I write of that which others have also experienced. Such is my aim, my hope, at least one of my many ultimate desires in composing both this book and my 5 volume autobiography, some of which is found in this book on the new Baha’i paradigm.

In my poetic opus, my epic, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, I like to think that, with Whitman, the reader can sense a merging of reader and writer. But I like to think, too, that readers can also sense in my epic a political philosophy, a sociology, a psychology, a global citizen--something we have all become. There is in my poetry a public and a private man reacting to the burgeoning planetization of humankind, the knowledge explosion and the tempest that has been history’s experience, at least as far back as the 1840s, if not as far back as the days of Shaykh Ahmad after he left his homeland in N.E. Arabia in the decade before those halcyon days of the French Revolution and its bloody aftermath in the Jacobin Terror.

There is much more than verse-making here in my autobiographical opus. My work is not the Leaves of Grass or the Cantos. My epic is not one long poem. I use these works of these now famous poets for comparative purposes, as I say, to throw light on my own writing. I have no hesitation in making what Donald Kuspit calls identitarian claims for my poetry and my prose. My writing in all its forms expresses my identity; Kuspit emphazes what he calls the idiosyncratic artist and it is the very idiosyncrasies of the artist that make him convincing and give him credibility in our postmodern era. Yes, Mr. Kuspit, but I might add, only to a few.

As idiosyncratic artist and author, poet and publisher, I create my own cosmology, my own identity, an identity which is a mosaic of true and false, real and unreal. I pursue a sense of artistic and human identity in a situation where both I and my literary guidelines are idiosyncratic. My epic is a radically personal one as, indeed, all individual epics are. Epics aim to establish both conscious and unconscious communication between individuals. The identities of those who write the epics often confuse their egotistic pride with self-respect and honour. Their emotions are often expressions of their attempts to locate the source of their irritations outside themselves in external reality and who, like this writer, are caught up with “the allurements and the trivialities of the world without, and of the pitfalls of the self within.” I have found the writing of this epic journey, in this epic literary form, a mystery.

As yet there has been no commentary on my total oeuvre by any observer or critic. I would be happy to wait until after my passing; indeed I would be happy to wait even unto eternity. I leave the response in the hand of God, so to speak, with those mysterious dispensations of that watchful Providence.

HUMANITY'S FALSE HOPES AND PARADIGMATIC VISIONS

The magnitude of the ruin that the human race had brought upon itself and its catalogue of horrors, a ruin the Guardian had described in a passage I had read as far back as the late 1950s, has been at the centre of my life, my civilization and the religion I have been part and parcel of for decades. The culture of learning that was put into special focus in the mid-to-late 1990s made me conscious of this reality more than ever and I knew, again as the House pointed out, that humanity appeared “desperate to believe that through some fortuitous conjunction of circumstances it could bend the conditions of human life into conformity with its desires.” The vision that had been at the centre of my Faith, a revolutionary vision, helped me create a reality which again helped me create the world in which I lived. For, as that long-time secretary of the NSA of the USA Horace Holley once said, and as I repeat for the second time in this book for emphasis, “vision creates reality.” This vision has been an important part of the more reflexive, introspective nature of my experience in the two epochs during which this paradigm has been institutionalized. Vision, values, beliefs and attitudes are all indispensable means of acquiring any historical knowledge at all. But, of course, there are no guarantees.

This paradigm provides what might be called an ideal framework, a pure form, a social construction, an ideal-typical construct, an action-oriented overview which the Bahais aim to achieve in the practical, real world but often, if not always or for the most part, never achieve. The framework is put into practice, is realized, is achieved in practice, in the conceptual imaginations, in the visionary frameworks, in the many-sided models of community. This framework is an important and useful tool for analysis for the body of the believers. It comprises as a total paradigm what might be called a conceptual utopia within which meaningful action is placed in a context of practical material and community life.

The focus, for the believer, is on the interplay of meaning and the conditions of action and an important part of this interplay is the creative aspect of human action. Meaning for the individuals concerned is an outcome of the creative activities in the changing historical circumstances. Meaning emerges from the relations between the actors and it emerges in the context of a new normative order from a charismatic Source. In some ways this context is much the same as it has always been. As the French say: "the more things change the more they stay the same." As one critic put it: the new paradigm seems to me just a movement of the deckchairs with most of community activity remaining the same. I’m sure this is the case for many Baha’is. In other ways, the changes are significant and equivalent to a new paradigmatic community construct.

Functioning as a medium of self-identification, the Bahai epic-narrative can provide individuals with an expression, an example, a source for an increase in energy and an increase in courage. This increase generates intentionality, a willingness and a desire to act. For all of us the desire to act in ways that are part of this new paradigm is essential. This action is in turn an experience of mastery that comes from dealing with life and it can contribute to a sense of identity, of authentic selfhood and intimacy in a postmodern society where authenticity and intimacy are important survival tools. For many, though, it must be recognized that there is no desire for such intimacy. Such individuals often prefer withdrawal from commitment and community involvement. Not everyone is blessed with what one writer called a socio-hormone. Many want to withdraw from what they, and T.S. Eliot, see as “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is modern history.” Indeed, the sound of this withdrawal, if it could be measured, is deafening and it has complex roots which this book cannot examine in any depth. The failure to achieve a sense of community intimacy is a major source of people's alienation and their rootlessness in society. And this alienation cannot always, not frequently, be overcome. For still others withdrawal leads to return. Withdrawal and return become a rhythm. This topic has been dealt with in Bahai literature and I leave it to readers to follow the literary journey down its labyrinthine paths.

BACK TO COMMENTS ON MY WRITING AND MY STORY

My writing, my poetry, contains within it, in page after page, an expression of, an identity with what has been and is now the ruling passion of my life: the Baha’i Faith, its history and teachings. This Faith seems to have wrapped itself over the landscape of my life and filled my being over these nearly fifty years of a pioneering life. Indeed, I have come to see myself with an increasing consciousness, as a part of, one of the multitude of lights in what ‘Abdu’l-Baha called a “heavenly illumination” which would flow to all the peoples of the world from the North American Baha’i community and which would, as Shoghi Effendi expressed it “adorn the pages of history.” Of course, this vision must be perpetually remade and adjusted like a hat. It must be placed in a perspective that is not a pretentious covering for the self and not a self-consciousness that is some sense of self-glorification and aggrandizement. But it is a vision of self that attempts to place within the context of my daily life an action-oriented mentality that dramatizes my intentions. These actions become, or such is my aim, the visible concomitant of an invisible process within me.

My story is part of that larger story, the first stirrings of a spiritual revolution, which at the local level has often, has usually, indeed, just about always, seemed unobtrusive and uneventful as far as the wider world of public significance is concerned, at least where I have lived and pioneered, growing not unlike Christianity as it did against a background of the Augustan system “half hidden, along the foundations of society.” But my inner journey is also, in basic ways, an expression of this larger journey. As John Hatcher writes in closing his helpful article on this process:

“In this inner dimension, spirituality becomes a sort of dialogue between the human soul and the Divine Spirit as channelled through the Manifestation. It is within this subjective, but nevertheless real, dimension of inner spirituality that one finds all the passion, the exaltation of spirit, as well as the terrible but somehow precious moments of despair, of utter helplessness and defeat, of shame and repentance. It is here that one learns with the deeply certain knowledge only personal experience can bestow, that the ultimate category of existence, the absolute and transcendent God who guides and oversees our destiny, is an infinitely loving and merciful Being.”

The narrative imagination, then, that is at the base of the Bahai epic and my own epic poetry needs to be seen by readers in the context that Hatcher describes above. As far as possible I have tried to make my own narrative: honest, true, accurate, realistic, informed, intelligible, knowledgeable, part of a new collective story, a new shared reality, part of the axis of the oneness of humanity that is part of the central ethos of the Baha’i community. As I develop my story through the grid of narrative and poetry, of letters and essays, of notebooks and photographs, I tell my story the way I see it, through my own eyes and my own knowledge, as Baha’u’llah exhorted me to do in Hidden Words, but with the help of many others.

My aim is not to rise in a Bahai community hierarchy or to become part of a necessary and inevitable bureaucracy of Bahai institutions on the appointive and elective sides of this Faith or in the everyday life of a local, cluster, regional, national and international community. But I do want to be part of this new society until my dying days. It is a new society already in the making, a society in which there is already concerted action toward a single goal, a map for the journey and not just vague sentiments of good will, however genuine. It is a society with explicit agreement on principles which require coordinated action. But it is not easy and it is not simple. My task is as a part of this new religion, this new community, this organization that is not competing with other religions but is a social force with a very special, perhaps even unique contribution to make to the aims of global peace and unity of our planet.

My aim as a poet and publisher, a writer and editor, a journalist and independent scholar, a husband, a father and a grandfather as well as a retired teacher and lecturer, tutor and adult educator, taxi-driver and ice-cream salesman--is to be a source of social good and serve my society within the limits of my incapacity, as Abdu'l-Bahá once put it. The liberal spirit, the sense of freedom, in the Bahai community is not a liberalism which, in many ways, is but a vast argument about the extent, the limits, of bureaucracy. It is a liberalism, a structure of freedom which has as its context, its framework, a Bahai administration, a framework of a new Order of action for our age. It has more similarities with the liberalism of John Stuart Mill, but it would be utterly misleading to attempt to compare this Order with any of the diverse systems of thought conceived by the many minds of men throughout history, ancient or modern. And this question of freedom and authority is far too complex to deal with here in any proper and comprehensive fashion in the middle of this book.

In the process of living, I leave behind me traces, things in your present, dear reader, which stand for now absent things, things from the past, from a turning point in history, one of history’s great climacterics. The phenomenon of the trace is clearly akin to the inscription of lived time, my time and that of my generation, upon astronomical time from which calendar time comes. History is “knowledge by traces”, as F. Simiand puts it. And so, I bequeath traces: mine and those of many others I have known, those of a particular time in history. Sometimes I think that these traces amount to a voluminous anatomy of self about which there is a very questionable value; at other times I think these traces are so intimately linked with the emergence of a new religion, a new Order with the very future in its bones, that there is an inner thrill and excitement that is difficult to keep in the form of a moderate expression.

But however I see these traces, Hatcher’s words that I have quoted above ring true and they offer a perspective on what is part of my aim, my goal, my process and what is the content of this work. These traces must be seen within a “subjective but nevertheless real dimension of inner spirituality” where I find “all the passion, the exaltation of spirit, as well as the terrible but somehow precious moments of despair, of utter helplessness and defeat, of shame and repentance.” This is true for all of us as we cultivate this culture of learning. I raise my voice here as one person but what I write applies, it seems to me anyway, to millions of my fellow believers.

In the years since the sense of my total oeuvre as epic was first formulated, that is more than a decade ago in the period 1997 to 2000, I have been working on the 2nd to 6th editions of my prose narrative Pioneering Over Four Epochs. In these last ten years, September 2001 to September 2011, this narrative has come to assume its own epic proportions. It is now 2600 pages in length and occupies five volumes. It is one of the many extensions, one of the many facets, parts and parcels, of the larger epic of my total oeuvre that I have described above and which had its initial formulation form from September 1997 to September 2000 at the outset of this new Bahai culture.

After more than a dozen years then, from 1997 to 2011, nearly all the years of this new paradigm, I have extended my epic, my world of prose memoir, of narrative autobiography. I also completed in that same period a 300 page study of the poetry of Roger White which was placed on the Juxta Publications website in October 2003. It was entitled: The Emergence of a Baha’i Consciousness in World Literature: The Poetry of Roger White. The first edition of my website in 1997, also entitled Pioneering Over Four Epochs, became a second edition on May 21st 2001 two days before the official opening of The Terraces on Mt. Carmel on 23 May 2001. My website is now 14 years old and is in its fourth edition. My old website(2001 to 2011) contained some 3000 pages and 450,000 words and was, for me, an integral part of this epic. The 4th edition of my website is the central matrix for several million words spread over cyberspace.

There are so many passions, thoughts, indeed so much of one’s inner life that cannot find expression in normal everyday existence. Much of my poetry and prose, perhaps my entire epic-opus is a result of this reality, at least in part; my literary output is also a search for words to describe the experience, my experience, of our age, my age and the religion I have now been associated with since DNA was discovered and Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female was published both in 1953. In 1953 another one of those Bahai paradigms I have already mentioned was beginning as were new paradigms in the secular and scientific worlds. My total oeuvre of words in several genres could be said to be part of my very psycho-biological-philosophical self. My poetry and prose allows me to release surplus, excess, energy and an abundance of thought and desire which I am unable to assimilate and give expression to in my everydayness and its quotidian realities. This entire work is an expression of thoughts, desires, passions, beliefs and attitudes which I am unable to find a place for amidst the ordinarily ordinary and the humanly human aspects of everyday life. This literary epic adorns the ordinary; it enriches my everyday experience, as if from a distance.

DRAWING ON THE THOUGHTS OF OTHER THINKERS:
YET AGAIN

Suffering ceases to be suffering when it has found a meaning wrote Victor Frankl in his now famous book Man’s Search For Meaning. These words of Frankl were quoted by Elizabeth Rochester in her long, fascinating and intellectually stimulating letter to Canadian international pioneers over twenty-five years ago. I think Frankl is partly right; sadly, many never find a meaning to their suffering. Since all of us struggle with suffering, our own and the world’s, in one way or another all our lives, the meaning of the suffering eludes millions. It is important for the generations who are experiencing this new paradigm in its earliest stages to be highly cognizant of the multitude of spiritual verities that previous generations of Bahais, perhaps as many as six if one defines a generation as a twenty-five year period, have come to experience and understand and which stand available in primary and secondary literature as well as on cassette tapes, CDs and videos to help illuminate their paths.

In 1997-1998, in the first half of the Four Year Plan(1996-2000), I began to think of writing a personal epic poem and so fashioned some ten pages as a beginning; this particular poem with its ten page beginning is still a work in progress and has not got beyond those ten pages. But by September 2000 I began to envisage my total prose-poetic output in terms of an epic since, by then, I had written several million words of prose-poetry and prose across a number of literary genres. As the efflorescence on Mt Carmel and its tapestry of beauty began to unfold, I felt my writing pregnant with meaning, at least for me if not for others. The sheer size of my epic work in its several genres, it seemed, made the concept of my total oeuvre as epic a natural one. I imposed, then, by sensible and insensible degrees over a period of years, the epithet--epic--on this great swath of my writing as it sat in my computer directory.

The advent of instant travel and international communication has made the fundamental context of the Bahai Faith international; it is the axis of the oneness of humanity. As I have been writing in the last twenty years, I often felt as if I was there in Haifa at the Bahai World Centre. This was especially true thanks to cinema, video, DVD, cassette-tape, CD, photography, hi-fidelity sound systems, a print and electronic media which had been sensibly and insensibly transforming the world into a neighbourhood before my very eyes in the last half of the 20th century and in this new millennium. Indeed, much of history and life in contemporary society, its content and context, were being restored, recreated, illumined and revitalized before my intellectual eyes. The Tablet of Carmel itself is full of allusions, symbols and metaphors which enrich and enhance the meaning systems of the individuals in the Bahai community everywhere. I had been trying to memorize this Tablet for over twenty-five years and many of its sentences and passages had become a part of my inner life. But again, these comments are somewhat tangential to the thrust of this book.


DRAWING ON OTHER WRITERS: YET AGAIN

A.       I often mention Arnold Toynbee in this book

I have had to keep the remaining part of this analysis and statement, this personal overview of the new Bahai paradigm in a separate document in my computer directory, a document entitled: “Paradigm-Remaining” in order to have it accessible in my computer. One day I will place this remaining piece in another document at BLO.(note: total--193,000 words and 420 pages: Parts 1 and 2 of this book.



B.       Other Baha’i Writers on Some Aspects of the New Paradigm



Tom Price, an inspirational speaker, gave 3 talks and they are found at this link: http://bahaiblog.net/site/2011/09/27/5-year-plan-talks-by-tom-price/

End of Document at BLO