There is no clean intellectual coherence...

The frustration we feel when trying to explain or justify God, whether to ourselves or to others, is a symptom of knowledge untethered from innocence, of words in which no silence lives, of belief occurring wholly on a human plane. Innocence returns us to the first call of God, to any moment in our lives when we were rendered mute with awe, fear, wonder. Absent this, there is no sense in arguing for God in order to convince others, for we ourselves are not convinced...

There is no clean intellectual coherence, no abstract ultimate meaning to be found, and if this is not recognized, then the compulsion to find such certainty becomes its own punishment. This realization is not the end of theology, but the beginning of it: trust no theory, no religious history or creed, in which the author's personal faith is not actively at risk.

Christian Wiman - My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer




...And Wiman quoting Rainer Maria Rilke

The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns relationship, and there arises a namelessness that must begin once more in our relations with God if we are to be complete and without evasion. The experience of feeling him recedes behind an infinite delight in everything that can be felt; all attributes are taken away from God, who is no longer sayable, and fall back into creation, into love and death.


...And Further Wiman

10 Meditation Techniques that I Have Found Helpful

In the past year I have gotten into meditation and have experimented with a number of techniques. While there is great value in going deep with one method, I have also found value in becoming comfortable with many, having many tools in the toolbox, so to speak. Over time it becomes natural to switch among them, to mix and match, even in the course of a single sit. Here is the list of boiled down techniques and tips that I wish I would have had from the beginning.

What Would an Agnostic Spirituality Look Like?

Sam Harris, an outspoken atheist, is coming out with a book titled "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion". I will be interested to read because, while I consider myself more of an agnostic, I relate to his interest in meditation and higher states of consciousness while at the same time being skeptical of the metaphysical implications that can be drawn from the phenomenology of it. He has come out with a precursor article that I highly recommend. His discussion of the various philosophies/methods of awakening to the realization of "no-self" (for Baha'i's, read "the death of the self"), particularly Theravada Vipasssana compared to Advaita Vedanta and Dzogchen direct inquiry, squarely hit home what I have been pondering lately. I was also surprised to hear that he doesn't believe consciousness is limited to the 5 senses, which makes him kind of an outlier among atheists.

There should be a law

Poverty. Homelessness. Addiction problems. Hate. Violence. War, etc. There should be a law against them all.

Oh that's right there is---Bahai 'law'. And we need it now but---until there is a bunch of us, more than there are now, we have to pretty much live with the above. So entry troop on!

I have been writing as Portland's Addiction Examiner for over a year or more so go check it out. When you get to the site put my name Grace E. Reed and you should be able to open the articles. Let me know if that works---meanwhile I continue to work on these issues as a Bahai.

Examiner.com

God, global self-government, and male domination

Dear Ones and Friends,

One of the things I have realized about world federation theory as a result of a recent Wilmette Institute course on this subject is the extent to which both the theory as articulated by scholars and the actual efforts of good-willed people in the direction of world federation are disabled by a failure to take account of male evolutionary psychology and the ritual displays that almost all males, including human males, go through when threatened with loss of territory or control.

Just as Baha'u'llah was the prisoner of male leaders, so too world federation and His world order--the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth--are the prisoner of specifically male political thinking.

By the amount to which we fail to address and overcome typical male thinking in relation to world order, by the amount to which we fail to empower girls, women, and non-adversarial patterns and methods of self-government, by that amount we fail to appreciate the nature of the Kingdom, of the world order of Baha'u'llah, and the notion of global self-government guided by God.

The nasty, pathological aspects of alpha male evolutionary psychology are again dominating recent headlines and distracting the public from urgent issues of humanity’s future sustainability. First, there was Putin’s gesture in Crimea, then North Korean missile tests, and now Japan's reaction to North Korea.  Suddenly the world of “politics” reveals itself again as mostly a snake pit of male-psychology-driven tensions. Meanwhile, NASA and UN reports on climate change paint an ever more urgent picture of the need for massive global cooperation in human family problem-solving.

Buddhism, Meditation, and the Baha'i Faith: Part 3

Part 1 here and part 2 here.  

I realize that most people go into meditation looking for stability, happiness, and comfort in the face of their own existence...I have spent many years cultivating extreme experiential instability, careful awareness of the minutia of my suffering and the clear perception that I don't even exist as a separate entity...I can honestly say that these practices are without doubt the sanest thing I have ever done in my life. -Daniel Ingram

The path of insight is not known to be easy. There are said to be many ups and downs - ecstatic bliss and energy one moment and crushing fear and misery the next. There are many maps of this territory, all different on a superficial level, yet all containing many of the same fundamentals. In the words of Ingram:

One of the most profound things about these stages is that they are strangely predictable regardless of the practitioner or the insight tradition. Texts two thousand years old describe the stages just the way people go through them today, though there will be some individual variation on some of the particulars today as then. The Christian maps, the Sufi maps, the Buddhist maps of the Tibetans and the Theravada, and the maps of the Khabbalists and Hindus are all remarkably consistent in their fundamentals. I chanced into these classic experiences before I had any training in meditation, and I have met a large number of people who have done likewise. These maps, Buddhist or otherwise, are talking about something inherent in how our minds progress in fundamental wisdom that has little to do with any tradition and lots to do with the mysteries of the human mind and body. They are describing basic human development. These stages are not Buddhist but universal, and Buddhism is merely one of the traditions that describes them, albeit unusually well.

In this post I will discuss the map, known as the "Progress of Insight", which is originally derived from the Pali cannon in the Theravada tradition, as related by Mahasi Sayada and Daniel Ingram. The part of the map that I will discuss is "1st path" (there are four successive paths) which is basically the road to initial, but not complete, enlightenment, to a point after which insight generates itself automatically whether one practices or not, beyond the "plane of limitation". I will also relate this path to the first Four Valleys in the Sufi tradition, as commented on by Baha'u'llah: Search, Love, Knowledge, and Unity. 

My motivation for doing this is simply to share something that has become a big part of my life. This is my own working model of spiritual development and I will relate some of my experiential reports traveling along this path. 

Hotels, Ruhi, and an Inherently Implausible Goal

I'm paid to care about you.

Baha'is and hotels are running into similar problems

The century leading up to 1960 was an era of grand hotels. Palace-like, they catered to the rich and provided a unique, personal experience because they were mostly independently owned or part of small groups.

Then came the chains. In the 1950s a young Mr Hilton started building his hotels around the world and abandoned the grand hotel model. Soon came Mr Marriott and others with standard operating procedures (SOPs) that made every hotel in the chain conform to protocols, down to how long an egg is cooked, how many times the phone is allowed to ring before picking up, and what is available on TV. A hotel might have 2,000 SOPs to follow.

The shift from character-filled grand hotels to ubiquitous uniformity meant that the personal connections were lost. Now, customers have no fealty, and would hardly know the difference between hotels were it not for the brand name on the building.

Hotel owners are aware of the problem. The best hotels have a happy atmosphere and staff that go out of their way to be helpful, and such hotels are more profitable. Bosses have tried to manufacture this emotional connection for guests, but how would that come through an SOP? As soon as customers realize that the smile and personal note on their receipt is a job requirement, the magic is gone. Is it even possible to mass-produce genuine emotional connections?

A recent article, Be My Guest, in The Economist magazine (from which I gathered much of the above) had a great line that summed up something I haven't been able to put to words myself:

"Replicating intimate service on a mass scale is an inherently implausible goal"

If you can't see where I'm going with this, the worldwide Baha'i community has been struggling with this for decades.

10 of My Favorite Posts From Other Baha'i Coherence Bloggers

There has been a lot of great blogging here over the last few years. In the the spirit of nostalgia I felt compelled to highlight 10 of my favorite posts by other bloggers, although many others could have easily made the list.

1.) Aria's post Montessori, Evolution, and Spirituality
2) Daniel's Post Animal Companions in Life and Death, Part II
3) Greg's post Some Thoughts on how Baha'is Approach Moral and Social Questions
4) Bryan's post 29 Nations of the Earth
5) Kat's post On Behalf of the Village: Neighborhood Children's Classes and the Baha'i Child
6) Bryan's post The End of War
7) Jakes post Why should we REALLY Care about Poverty
8) Ryan's post Does motivation matter? Motivation, incentive-based policies, and their interconnectedness.
9) Mary's post Benjamin Franklin's America
10) Greg's series on Christianity and the Baha'i Faith 1 2 3 4