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The flame of the fire of love, in this world of earth and water, comes through the power of attraction and not by effort and striving. Nevertheless, by effort and perseverance, knowledge, science and other perfections can be acquired; but only the light of the Divine Beauty can transport and move the spirits through the force of attraction. Therefore, it is said: “Many are called, but few are chosen.”
~ ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
“Wisdom begins in wonder.” –Socrates
Genesis 1 – Adam Clarke Commentary1 Bereshith bara Elohim eth hashshamayim veeth haarets; GOD in the beginning created the heavens and the earth.
Many attempts have been made to define the term GOD: as to the word itself, it is pure Anglo-Saxon, and among our ancestors signified, not only the Divine Being, now commonly designated by the word, but also good; as in their apprehensions it appeared that God and good were correlative terms; and when they thought or spoke of him, they were doubtless led from the word itself to consider him as THE GOOD BEING, a fountain of infinite benevolence and beneficence towards his creatures.
A general definition of this great First Cause, as far as human words dare attempt one, may be thus given: The eternal, independent, and self-existent Being: the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence: he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, and most spiritual of all essences; infinitely benevolent, beneficent, true, and holy: the cause of all being, the upholder of all things; infinitely happy, because infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made: illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only to himself, because an infinite mind can be fully apprehended only by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived; and who, from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, right, and kind. Reader, such is the God of the Bible; but how widely different from the God of most human creeds and apprehensions!
,,,,the mystical experience which in shorthand might be said to be a three stage experience – 1. me and object – 2. object – 3. object and me. This experience was caught a long time ago (8th Century) by the Chinese poet Li Po;
“The birds have vanished from the sky,
and now the last clouds slip away.
We sit alone, the mountain and I,
until only the mountain remains.”
Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.[1]
Flow, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
According to Csíkszentmihályi, flow is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from flow. It is the same mindfulness as ecstatic lovemaking, the merging of two into a fluidly harmonious one. The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.[2]
great site on mind maps
http://bahai-covenant.blogspot.com/
“Divorced from the Institution of the Guardianship”
“Divorced from the institution of the Guardianship, the World Order of Baha’u'llah would be mutilated. . .” What did Shoghi Effendi mean by this?
Shoghi Effendi makes this pronouncement in his great expository letter “The Dispensation of Baha’u'llah:”
Divorced from the institution of the Guardianship the World Order of Bahá’u'lláh would be mutilated and permanently deprived of that hereditary principle which, as ‘Abdu’l-Bahá has written, has been invariably upheld by the Law of God. “In all the Divine Dispensations,” He states, in a Tablet addressed to a follower of the Faith in Persia, “the eldest son hath been given extraordinary distinctions. Even the station of prophethood hath been his birthright.” Without such an institution the integrity of the Faith would be imperiled, and the stability of the entire fabric would be gravely endangered. Its prestige would suffer, the means required to enable it to take a long, an uninterrupted view over a series of generations would be completely lacking, and the necessary guidance to define the sphere of the legislative action of its elected representatives would be totally withdrawn. (The World Order of Baha’u'llah, p. 148; hereafter, “Paragraph A”)
What does Shoghi Effendi mean by this? Does he mean, if there is ever not a living Guardian, the World Order of Baha’u'llah will be mutilated and all these unthinkable things will happen? Is the World Order mutilated right now, because Shoghi Effendi was not able to name a successor Guardian, and the Universal House of Justice functions as the Head of the Faith without the presence of a Guardian? Faithfulness to the Writings requires that we strive to understand exactly what he meant.
“Jesus for Paul was clearly a living and personal present reality who made himself known to him on the road to Damascus. But in other respects, and here we must be aware of the many senses of the word ‘revelation’, Paul received the gospel by means of human agency rather than directly or immediately. And that is the situation of most, if not all, of the rest of us. Wherever Jesus is now – that is, quite independently of what we happen to believe about the ascended Christ present in the church and the world – we do not have a direct, unmediated relation to him, at least in the sense that the words which communicate his reality are firmly anchored in the past. This means that because the texts are couched in the concepts of a particular historical context. God comes to language in the particularities of a culture. This means that the interpretation of the revelatory particulars is entrusted to particular people, who by handing on what they have received become what we call tradition. As we saw, tradition is, before it is anything else, a form of personal relation, and we need the mediation of a tradition of interpretation if we are to receive revelation for what it is.” (in A Brief Theology of Revelation, 108-109)
