Heaven Is Shunned (The Old Men in the Palace of Ivory)

Heaven Is Shunned

Slaving for the Faith,
a servant every day
When I'm alone
always in prayer, always in prayer,
for oneness, for unity, for mankind
waiting for the promises to fulfil.

My friend in Faith talked too much
about the old men in their Palace of Ivory,
Her words were dancing in the air,
but she only tried to understand the Faith.
She was expelled from the Faith
appointed to be an internal enemy.

The bigwigs roared
Shunned! Shunned! Shunned!
The top brass screamed
Spiritual disease, Spiritual disease!

They killed her just like they killed the Báb,
because they rule with terror, terror.
But her dancing, spiritual words
forming an image in my mind,
infiltrating my exposed soul.

Tears on humanity's face,
because shundamentalism can't save them.

The Covenant is a weapon
which sounds expel! expel! expel!
Is not damaging another individual's soul a crime?
Heaven is shunned, I say.

I raise my head,
now crying out for this uncaring Faith,
a result of afraid old men in their Palace of Ivory.

Terror on a child's face.

This young Faith was murdered
through shunning of all relatives and descendants of the Beloved,
through cutting all the branches of the divine Tree.

I raise my head, now crying out.
Heaven is shunned, I say!

What had Baha'i been without Sufism?

When I'm reading more about this, I'm surprised why not the Sufis and the Baha'is cooperate. Yes, I know that the Sufis in muslim countries don't have the same faith as Sufis in the Western world. Murshid Elias Amidon writes:

Some years ago I went to Fez, Morocco, to deepen my practice under the tutelage
of a Sufi shaykh of the Qadiri order. Although I am not formally a Muslim,
I was welcomed by him and in the dhikr circles I attended. One day, however,
when I was visiting the house of one of his students, the student turned on me
angrily for not being a real Muslim, and insisted that the only true Sufi path
could be found by following the Shari’a—the laws of Islam. Some months later
the shakyh told me he had heard of this conflict and had been furious at his
student for his narrow-mindedness.

But the shaykh’s accepting view is less common than his student’s. One often
reads in current books on Sufism repeated and harsh attacks on what the authors
perceive as “pseudo-spirituality” masquerading as Sufism in the
Western world. They are especially sensitive about any suggestion
that Sufism could function as an authentic path of awakening outside
the Shari’a and doctrine of Islam, or that it could look for any
of its origins prior to the revelations of the Prophet Mohammed.
In my view these authors are quite right in affirming that Islamic
Sufism is Islamic Sufism, which naturally takes for its primary reference
the Qur’an, hadith, and the treasury of Sufi mystical writings
that have formed the body of Islamic Sufi doctrine through the
past fourteen centuries.

Universal Revelation

But when the Sufi mystic Inayat Khan brought Sufism to the West in 1910,
a major watershed occurred in the history of Sufism. Himself a Muslim Sufi
initiated into the four primary Sufi orders—Chisti, Suhrawardi, Nakshibandi,
and Qadiri—Inayat Khan revolutionized and re-expressed traditional Sufism by
releasing it from an exclusive relation with Islam. “Sufism has never been owned
by any race or religion,” he wrote. “Sufism itself is the essence of all the religions
as well as the spirit of Islam.”

But it is unlikely the critics who condemn the “pseudo-spirituality” of our times
have Inayat Khan or his message of universal Sufism in mind when they write.
After all, the several Western Sufi orders that follow in Inayat Khan’s lineage
amount to no more than a few thousand people. Rather I think they are responding
to an unmistakable drift in Western spiritual culture away from adherence
to a single religion and dogma, and consequently many people’s
spiritual openness toward the inner teachings of several religions.
It is this more pervasive cultural movement that disturbs the religionists.
The well-respected writer William Stoddart sums up their objections
in this way: “One cannot take the view that, since mysticism or
esoterism is the inner truth common to all religions, one can dispense with
religion (exoterism) and seek only mysticism (esoterism).” Or, as other authors
repeat, “There can be no esoterism without an exoterism,” that is,
there can be no authentic mystical path without a “divinely revealed
religion” to ground it and inspire it.

I would like to explore this issue here because it causes much confusion in those
who find themselves outside a formal religious tradition but who are nevertheless
dedicated to a rigorous spiritual aspiration and path. Specifically I would
like to look at what is meant by the exoteric, especially its ethical dimension,
and how we might understand the source of exoteric forms in revelation, which
is the arising of what we experience as true.

If the function of the esoteric refers to a path of mystical realization, of interest
to only a few, the function of the exoteric refers to (at least) three areas of benefit
to a more general audience of humanity. These three areas are:

1. Ethics. The provision by formal religions of codes of social conduct
to promote peace, fairness, and social and personal well-being.
Here we have the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the
Mount, the Shari’a, Buddhist precepts, Jewish law, etc.

2. Doctrine. The doctrine of a religion unites us with the divine or
ultimate reality through the view it gives us of our place in the cosmos,
the meaning of life and our mortality, as well as the spiritual
lessons given through its symbolic narrative. When it claims to
be based on divinely revealed scripture, religious doctrine carries a
profound power to engage people and to secure their commitment
to its view and teachings.

3. Worship. Formal religion also provides inspiration and a channel
for our reverence and our desire to express it. Awe, intimacy, longing,
love of beauty, praise, and thankfulness are given a context and
focus through communal ritual and prayer.
Hence the charge by religionists is plain: those who follow a mystical path not
faithful to a single formal religion are separated from any authentic source of
ethics, doctrine, and worship, and are therefore relegated to a “cafeteria-style,”
“pick-and-choose” religion that has no depth, roots, or obligation.
I wish to affirm here, in the strongest possible terms, that in my experience
exactly the opposite is true. We—and now I use “we” to include all those who
follow a sincere path of spiritual awakening outside the definitions of a single
faith—we are blessed with nothing less than a source of ethics, doctrine, and
worship that arises from the Universal Revelation of All of Existence. It is sufficient
to inspire our lives with all the guidance and reverence we could hope
for as human beings.

Universal Revelation

What is Universal Revelation? It is both the source of the vast heritage of guidance
and wisdom we have received from the past and the source of our everevolving
awakening. Ultimately it is Life and the source of Life. Through the
grace of Universal Revelation we receive ethical guidance, a meaningful world
view, and a communion of worship which is non-exclusive in its scope and
profound in its realization.

Typically “Divine Revelation” is understood as a transaction that has occurred
sometime in the distant past between God and a prophet or other holy figure.
Through that transaction a message is given of benefit to a certain people or to
humanity as a whole. In speaking here of Universal Revelation I am not implying
there are two kinds of revelation, divine and universal. They are the same.
My point in using the word “universal” in the context of revelation is to free
the notion of revelation from its associations with exclusivity and with the idea
that only the great prophets of humanity could ever receive revelation from the
Divine.

Even the idea of revelation as a transaction is questionable. After all, what we
mean by God or the Divine is Oneness, Unity, the Only Being. There are not
two, a Divine Giver and a mortal receiver. The Divine reveals through Creation
immanently, not transactionally. This point is crucial in understanding
Universal Revelation: it is immanent. Immanent in the waves of the sea and
in the joy of the heart, immanent in the gaze of our eyes and the understanding
of our minds, immanent in birth and immanent in death. Both of these
words—“immanent” and “revealed”—describe the same intimate experience of
a depth being recognized out of the Very Nature of Things. The subject-object,
knower-known relation is not how this is experienced—rather the recognition
is revealed immanently and what is immanent is the transcendent.

I think that Baha'i would have been a different religion -- or no religion at all -- if not the Báb and Bahá'u'lláh had been so inspired by Sufism and the great Sufi poets who wrote poetry about Oneness 500 years ago.

Mi Randa

Sufi and Baha'i

The bridge between the Baha'i way and the Sufi way is very short

In 1923, Sufi Inayat Khan developed a multi-faith worship service that acknowledges and pays homage to the expressions of divine truth as they are revealed through all religions. This inspiring service, called the Universal Worship, honors the “unity of religious ideals,” and is celebrated on various occasions in both a formal ritual version as well as in a more informal style. The Universal Worship provides a powerful symbolic enactment of inter-religious unity and mutual gratitude in a world fractured by divisions and suspicion.

In the same peacemaking spirit of bearing witness to the unity of religious ideals, members of the Sufi Way seek to express inter-religious respect by visiting, praying, learning, and making friends in all places of worship of all faiths, wherever we are welcome.

While we each may have a root religious tradition of our own to which we are primarily committed, we experience that this active contact with other forms of worship and revelation deepens our own faith and sense of the sacred, and adds in some small way to the increase of tolerance and peace among the world’s people.

By the way, does anyone know the Arabic and Persion words for "oneness" and "unity", spelled with latin letters?

Mi Randa

Many of Bábs words are lost, but He will live!

Today we cry for the Báb (the Gate to the New Revelation of God) again. We don't know the exact day and year for the crusifixation of Jesus Christ, but we know exactly what happened to the 30 years old Báb in Tabríz in Persia at noon 1850.

The Bab attracted 30.000 – 40.000 followers, of whom 20.000 were killed between 1845 adn 1855, and the unease and commotion created by His message led the Shī‘a Islam authorities to put him to death on a charge of heresy. He and a disciple who begged to share His martyrdom were executed by a firing squad of 750 soldiers in a public square in Tabriz.

The remains of the Bab are now entombed in Haifa, Israel, in an extremly beautiful shrine on Mount Carmel.

The Baha'i Faith always request people do their own research, that's the way to religious conviction about the Baha'i Faith and that Bahá'u'lláh is the Manifestation of God and the Messenger of God in this time. But researching can be difficult because of the lack of primary information. Beside the writings of Bahá'u'lláh (Glory of God) and his son 'Abdu'l-Bahá (Servant of the Glory), 99% of the body of information comes from the Guardian Shoghi Effendi, the grandson of 'Abdu'l-Bahá.

When I read about the Báb in books about the Baha'i Faith, it's always a lot of Bábs importance and about his beautiful Holy writings and about the constantly recurring statement from Báb that Bahá'u'lláh is the next great Manifestation of God. But I rarerly see any of Bábs own words published and printed. In fact, there is only a few statements and lesser than ten prayers revealed by Báb to find in one tonne of translated Baha'i books and new books about the Baha'i Faith. And that is in English; in Swedish, German or Japanese it's much much lesser. Why? Why didn't Shoghi Effendis' office translate more of Bábs words? Does anyone have an explanation?

Robert Stockman tries to explain the problem of the sources this in his book "Some Notes on The Báb:

The availability of historical sources for the study of Babism is far greater than those for examining the rise of any other major religion, but there are still major gaps, and these limit our understanding. Some of them are the following:

A. Qájár Iran is still imperfectly studied; there is a vast amount of work to do on establishing the cultural and social context of Babism.

B. The sources on the life of the Báb are still little studied. Many remain unexamined in Bahá'í archives. Many have been lost because of neglect or persecution. Some are only partially available; The Dawn-Breakers is perhaps the best example of this. When Shoghi Effendi translated the work into English he appears to have extensively edited it and partially abridged it. The Persian version of The Dawn-Breakers is a Persian translation from the English text. Scholars are anxious to examine the original manuscript. A few non-Bahá'í scholars have even questioned the reliability of Shoghi Effendi's text in the absence of the original.

Furthermore, sometimes original sources contradict each other. For example: all sources say Mullá Husayn accepted the Báb on the night of 23 May 1844. But several sources, which are second-hand accounts of Mullá Husayn's own account of the night of the Báb's declaration, say that Mullá Husayn did not accept the Bab until three nights' study; in other words, that he started his investigation of the Báb's claim not on 23 May, but two or three nights earlier. But The Dawn-Breakers and God Passes By, say Mullá Husayn first met the Báb on the night of his declaration.

Much work needs to be done to understand Shoghi Effendi's interpretations of historical events. Apparently Shoghi Effendi did not claim infallibility in matters of historical fact, only in matters pertaining to theological interpretation and matters of protection of the Faith. Thus the Guardian's writings present important challenges for historians.

C. The writings of the Báb have been imperfectly preserved; hence we have not yet been able to establish an authoritative text in Persian/Arabic for many of His works. Future scholars will have to study the various manuscripts and reconcile their variant readings.

D. Further, there is the issue of the accuracy of several extremely early histories. It is known that Mírzá Jání, a Bábí who perished in the persecutions that followed the attempt on the life of the Shah in 1852, wrote a history or part of a history of the Bábí movement. Such a history would be of great significance to Bábí Studies because it was written a mere eight years after the Báb's declaration and only two years after the Báb's death; furthermore, it would have been written before the split between the Azalís and Bahá'ís, * a split that imposed two rival theological interpretations on the events of early Babism and raised many historical issues that have not been settled to this day.

The truth is that we don't know what Báb said about many things. The Báb was the Herald of Bahá'u'lláh, at least in Shoghi Effendis books about the Bábi movement. However, here is a prayer the Báb wrote that God shall watch over Him Whom God shall send:

SEND down Thy blessings, O my God, upon the Tree of the Bayán, upon its root and its branch, its boughs, its leaves, its fruits and upon whatsoever it beareth or sheltereth. Cause this Tree then to be made into a magnificent Scroll to be offered to the presence of Him Whom Thou wilt make manifest on the Day of Judgement, that He may graciously allow the entire company of the followers of the Bayán to be restored to life and that He may, through His bounty, inaugurate a new creation.

Indeed all are but paupers in the face of Thy tender mercy, and lowly servants before the tokens of Thy loving-kindness. I beg of Thee, by Thy bounty, O my God, and by the outpourings of Thy mercy and bestowals, O my Lord, and by the evidences of Thy heavenly favours and grace, O my Best Beloved, to watch over Him Whom God shall make manifest that no trace of despondency may ever touch Him.

And here is a a link for a Meditation on the Martyrdom of the Bab

Mi Randa, 16 Mercy, 164 B,E.

* Mírzá Yahyá was a 13 years yuounger half-brother of Bahá'u'lláh, who appeared as Subh-i-Azal around 1852, claiming to be the real successor of the Báb.

I have found the Guardian of the Baha'i Faith

Julia Margaret Grundy visited the Haifa-Akká-Mt Carmel-region in Syria (now northern Israel) 1874. Her diary resulted in the book Ten days in the light of Akká 1907.

The creator of the Baha'i Faith was Bahá'u'lláh (1863). His son 'Abdu'l-Bahá traveled to Europe and the USA to teach about the new faith. 'Abdu'l-Bahás grandson Shoghi Effendi was appointed as the Guardian of the Baha'i Faith. The Guardian's commission was to establish and organize the Faith, and to protect the Faith and the believers. The Guardian was a protector.

According to 'Abdu'l-Bahá and his will, the appointed Guardian and an elected "House of Justice" should work together as parallel institutions – implicitly in the near future. But Shoghi Effendi died without descendants 1957. Moreover, Shoghi Effendi had not appointed a successor at all, and the House of Justice had not been established. This was a state of crisis for the Baha'i Faith. Some individuals soon claimed that they were the next Guardian, but were expelled from the Faith by "The Hands of God", an assembly of leading baha'is appointed by 'Abdu'l-Bahá and Shoghi Effendi. The first election to the Universal House of Justice was implemented 1963 – 100 years after Bahá'u'lláhs proclamation in the Ridván garden outside Baghdad, beside the river Tigris.

The Baha'i Faith still has no Guardian for spiritual protection. Or does it? According to Julia Grundy Mount Carmel was and is the protector:

“The history of Mount Carmel is holy history. A spiritual atmosphere surrounds this 'Mountain of God.' Elijah and Jesus spent part of their precious lives upon it. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá loves Mount Carmel and has often visited it, sometimes staying overnight in caves which overlook the sea, in prayer and communion with God. Syria is the center of the world. The extent and variety of its resources, its wonderful fertility and natural advantages will make its future history extraordinary. Its possibilities of development are unlimited. It is the focus of interest in world history, the site of the Old and New Jerusalem. Mount Carmel will be a Mountain of Knowledge, Peace, and Protection in the future—the vineyard of God. We will not live to see this in the body but will view it spiritually. Mount Carmel will someday be covered with great universities and colleges of learning. Then the poor will enjoy the highest advantages from the establishment here of free institutions of education.”

“This is the Holy Land from whence all the Prophets and Holy Men came. No country in the world has such a bright light of Religion. The Light of God has always shone upon the world from this land, and the Religion of God has had its Source and Revelation here. It is wonderful even in its physical conformation. The Phoenicians came from here. Their great civilizations spread from Syria. Abraham came to this land. Here His Teaching became known. The King of Salem, Melchizedek, came from this land. All the Prophets had their missions here.”

Maybe Mount Carmel really is God's mountain? Anyway it has protected Abraham, Melchizedek, Elijah, Elisa, Jesus, Bahá'u'lláh and 'Abdu'l-Bahá. It protects the remains of the prophet and martyr Báb, who was executed by a firing squad in Tabriz, Persia, 1850.

Mi Randa, Mercy 15, 164 B.E.