RonPrice

I posted an introduction to the paradigmatic shift in the Baha’i community, the new culture of learning and growth that is at the heart of this paradigm, nearly three years ago. I did this posting at several internet sites and have revised that post in these last three years as developments in the paradigm have come about, as new messages from Bahá'í institutions have been published and as many individuals have commented verbally and in print on this new Baha'i culture. It seemed like a good idea to give readers some specific steps on how to access this now revised article, what is now a book of more than 160,000 words and more than 350 pages and is found at Baha’i Library Online(BLO)--especially with the publication at Ridvan of 2010 of a 13,000 word message from the Universal House of Justice--one of the longest messages of the Formative Age since that charismatic Force was institutionalized in the Guardianship and, in 1963, effloesced in the apex of Baha'i administration In the time this book has been on the internet there have been many thousand views of this analysis, this statement on the new paradigm at the few sites where it has been posted. In addition to googling “Baha’i Culture of Learning and Growth” and accessing this article in the process at several internet sites, readers can find this piece of writing at BLO by clicking on the following: bahai-library.org/file.php?file=price_culture_learning_paradigm Readers can also access the latest edition of this article at BLO by taking the following steps: (i) type Baha’i Library Online or Baha’i Academics Resource Library into your search engine; (ii) click on the small box “By author” at the top of the access page at BLO; (iii) type “Price” into the small box that then appears and click on the word “Go;” and then (iv) scroll down to article/document item #47 and (v) click on that item and read to your heart’s content. When your eyes and your mind start to glaze over, stop reading. The article can be downloaded free and you will then have access to this book, this context for all this new paradigmatic terminology that has come into the Baha’i community in the last 15 years with at least a preliminary inetegration of relevant passages from the latest House message. My statement, my book, is a personal one, does not assume an adversarial attitude, attempts to give birth of as fine an etiquette of expression as I can muster and, I like to think, possesses both candour and critical thought on the one hand and praise and delight at the many interrelated processes involved in the execution of this 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. But, in the end, my writing, my words and all of the quotations I place in contexts to illustrate what I want to illustrate--amount to my initial take on this new Baha'i paradigm. My book possesses no authority. Indeed, such a remark hardly needs saying. This book contains, as I emphasize, an update, an inclusion of commentary on the most recent messages from the institutions of the Cause—with a special focus on the Ridvan message of 2010. One of the advantages of the BLO site is the freedom it gives to a writer to update the article right on the site in an ongoing process as new insights from major thinkers in the Baha’i community and information from the elected and appointed institutions of the Cause comes to hand. If time and the inclination permit, check it out. No worries, no obligation, just if it interests you. You may find the piece of writing too long as I’m sure many readers do. It is certainly a view from the inside, but it is just one person’s view building as it does on the ideas and writings of others: Bahá'í institutions and individuals. We each have a different experience on the inside of this paradigm, on the inside of this Faith or, indeed, living on the inside of our global society. You may find this book too personal due to the fact that I attempt to answer the question: “where do I fit into this new paradigm?” After a few paragraphs of reading, you will get the flavour of the exercise. Just keep reading if your mind and spirit are enjoying the process.

---------------------- I could add much more on this subject but, for now, I rest my case. I may write again on this subject( from your one-trick pony as August1991 pointed out), if there are more reactions here. Thanks for the comments thusfar, folks.-Ron

--------------------- Thanks, JB Globe, foryour response. Sorry for not getting back to you sooner, but I did not see your response until today. Let me add the following before closing with yet another comment on Iran, a comment which draws on a recent statement from the internationally elected body at the apex of Baha'i administration: Iran's crisis of civilization will be resolved neither by blind imitation of an obviously defective Western culture nor by retreat into medieval ignorance. The answer to the dilemma was enunciated on the very threshold of the crisis, in the clearest and most compelling language, by a distinguished Son of Iran Who is today honoured in every continent of the world, but sadly not in the land of His birth. Persia's poetic genius captures the irony: "I searched the wide world over for my Beloved, while my Beloved was waiting for me in my own home." The world's appreciation of Bahá'u'lláh came perhaps most explicitly into focus on 29 May 1992, the centenary of His death, when the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies met in solemn session to pay tribute to Him, to His teachings and to the services rendered to humanity by the community He founded. On that occasion, the Speaker of the Chamber and spokespersons from every party rose, successively, to express their profound admiration of One who was described in their addresses as the Author of "the most colossal religious work written by the pen of a single Man", a message that "reaches out to humanity as a whole, without petty differences of nationality, race, limits or belief". What has been the response in His native land to a Figure whose influence has brought such honour to the name of Iran? From the middle years of the 19 century when He arose to champion this Cause, this new message, and despite the reputation His philanthropy and intellectual gifts had won, Bahá'u'lláh was made the object of a virulent campaign of persecution. In recognizing His mission, the forefathers of the present Baha'i community in Iran, had the imperishable glory of sharing in His sufferings, imperishable because such suffering lends greater meaning to their present struggle. Throughout the ensuing decades, those who have remained faithful to His Cause in spite of grievous hardship, who have sacrificed for it and promoted its civilizing message to the most remote regions of the planet have known your their portion of abuse, bereavement and humiliation--indeed each Bahá'í family in Iran, each in their own way. One of the most appalling afflictions, in terms of its tragic consequences, has been the slander of Bahá'u'lláh's Cause perpetrated by that privileged caste to whom Persia's masses had been taught to look for guidance in spiritual matters. For over 150 years, every medium of public information-- pulpit, press, radio, television and even scholarly publication--has been perverted to create an image of the Bahá'í community and its beliefs that is grossly false and whose sole aim is to arouse popular contempt and antagonism. No calumny has been too vile; no lie too outrageous. At no point during those long years were the Baha'is, the victims of this vilification, given an opportunity, however slight, to defend themselves and to provide the facts that would have exposed such calculated poisoning of the public mind.....enough for now....I rest my case, a case that will be with us for some time to come until, as you say, JB Globe, that demographic time-bomb which is creeping up on Iran's religious establishment goes off. My thinking is that it has already gone off but, like many a bomb, it is seen only in the years of its after effects.-Ron

I became involved in the Baha'i Faith back in the 1950s in Canada. My mother joined this new world Faith in 1953 and two years later the first serious persecution of the Baha'is in Iran in my lifetime occurred. This persecution has hit the media periodically all my life. The article below is just the latest in this long history, a history going back to the 1840s. The event I mention occurred 8 months ago, and the situation has got worse.-Ron Price, Australia ------------------------ Six Baha'i leaders in Iran were seized and imprisoned back in May 2008. The act prompted condemnation and concern from the international Baha'i community and a top American religious freedom panel. A U.S. panel says attacks on Iran's Baha'is have increased since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president. Iranian intelligence agents searched the homes of the six and then whisked them away, according to the Baha'i's World News Service. The report said the six were sent to Evin prison. The arrests followed the detention in March of another Baha'i leader. The Iranian Foreign Ministry could not immediately be reached for comment, and the incident has not been mentioned in Iran's state-run media. "Their only crime is their practice of the Baha'i faith," said Bani Dugal, the principal representative of the Baha'i international community to the United Nations. The U.S. State Department issued a statement "strongly" condeming the arrests, which it said were "a clear violation of the Iranian regime's international commitments and obligations to respect international religious freedom norms. "We urge the authorities to release all Baha'is currently in detention and cease their ongoing harassment of the Iranian Baha'i community," the U.S. statement said. The group -- regarded as the largest non-Muslim religious minority in Iran -- says the arrests are reminiscent of roundups and killings of Baha'is that took place in Iran two decades ago. "Especially disturbing is how this latest sweep recalls the wholesale arrest or abduction of the members of two national Iranian Baha'i governing councils in the early 1980s -- which led to the disappearance or execution of 17 individuals," Dugal said. "The early morning raids on the homes of these prominent Baha'is were well-coordinated, and it is clear they represent a high-level effort to strike again at the Baha'is and to intimidate the Iranian Baha'i community at large," she added. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom -- a government panel that advises the president and Congress -- condemned the Wednesday arrests, as well as another in March. The commission chairman called the acts the "latest sign of the rapidly deteriorating status of religious freedom and other human rights in Iran." The commission said the six were members of an informal Baha'i group that tended to the needs of the community after the Iranian government banned all formal Baha'i activity in 1983. The commission chairman, Michael Cromartie, echoed the feared that the "development signaled a return to the darkest days of repression in Iran in the 1980s when Baha'is were routinely arrested, imprisoned, and executed." The Baha'is are regarded as "apostates" in Iran and have been persecuted there for years. "Since 1979, Iranian authorities have killed more than 200 Baha'i leaders, thousands have been arrested and imprisoned, and more than 10,000 have been dismissed from government and university jobs," the commission said. The commission said that since President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power a few years ago, Baha'is "have been harassed, physically attacked, arrested, and imprisoned." "During the past year, young Baha'i schoolchildren in primary and secondary schools increasingly have been attacked, vilified, pressured to convert to Islam, and in some cases, expelled on account of their religion." The commission said other groups in the predominantly Shiite Muslim country of Iran, such Sufis and Christians, are subject to intimidation and harassment. Ahmadinejad's inflammatory statements about Israel have "created a climate of fear" among the country's Jews. The Baha'is say they have 5 million members across the globe, and about 300,000 in Iran. The Baha'is say their faith "is the youngest of the world's independent religions" and that its basic theme is that "humanity is one single race and that the day has come for its unification in one global society." They say their founder, Baha'u'llah (1817-1892), is regarded by Baha'is as "the most recent in the line of Messengers of God that stretches back beyond recorded time and that includes Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Krishna, Zoroaster, Christ and Muhammad."-Posted by Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania --------------------------------- The Baha'is have had a horrific time in the last 150++ years. I wrote the following prose poem to describe a tangential context and throw a contrasting light on the plight of the Baha'is.--Ron --------------------- THE GROWTH OF AN IDEA In watching the ABC TV’s four part series “Mafia: Mafia? What Mafia,” screened on Monday evenings at 9:35 to 10:30 p.m. from 25 February 2008 to 17 March 2008, I could not help but notice the stark contrast between two organizations that had their origins in the mid-nineteenth century but with psycho-ethnic-national-spiritual-historical roots that are obscure and complex even to the specialist. One of these organizations I belonged to and one I had heard about, read about and seen discussed in the media for half a century, from my youth in the 1950s and 1960s until just yesterday. After watching yet another discussion of the mafia on ABV TV, I felt moved to write this mostly prose-poem of contrast and comparison, two threads in my life: one a thin one I only experienced in the print and electronic media and the other that had become part of my inner life for over half a century. At the end of the 19th century The Sicilian ethnographer, a Palermo physician, Giuseppe Pitre wrote: “the mafia is the consciousness of one’s own worth, the exaggerated concept of individual force as the sole arbiter of every conflict, of every clash of ideas or interests.”1 Beginning with this consciousness, this paradigmatic psychology, an entrenched culture or “industry of violence” had developed in Sicily by the mid-19th century. Leopoldo Franchetti described the mafia in Sicily in 1876, in one of the first written reports on the mafia, as a culture, a way of life, an industry of organized destructiveness and terror deeply rooted in the institutions of mid-19th century Sicily. By the 1960s this culture had become embodied in an international organization whose direction of development was logical, indeed, hardly surprising given its embryonic origins and ethos. -Ron Price with thanks to Nancy Triolo, “Mediterranean Exotica and the Mafia "Other" or Problems of Representation in Pitre's Texts,” Cultural Anthropology,Vol.8 No.3, pp.306-316. At the end of the 19th century the well-known Cambridge University Orientalist Edward Granville Browne in 1890 met Bahá'u'lláh, the successor to the Báb whose teachings had been both popularized and anathematized in the 1840s in an Iranian bloodbath far more extensive than anything that occurred in Sicily. By 1890 Bahá'u'lláh had been a prisoner and an exile from Iran for almost 40 years. His teachings were at first shrouded in obscurity but gradually came to light in a vast literary output and exegesis by His successors. His followers were and still are considered heretics in Iran. Some 20,000 Babis, Baha’u’llah’s precursors, and Baha’is were brutally exterminated in the half century 1844 to 1894. Today Baha’u’llah is recognized by several million of His followers around the world as the Divine Teacher for this age. According to Bahá'í belief, such Teachers have included: Moses, Abraham, Christ, Muhammad, Krishna and Buddha, among others. They have appeared at intervals throughout history to found the world's great religious systems. They have been sent by an utterly mysterious, completely obscure, profoundly perplexing, forever unknowable Creator to enable us to bring human civilization to ever higher levels of achievement and knowledge, larger units of social and political organization, indeed, new and wonderful configurations deriving from the power of thought. –Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 5 March 2008. A lot can happen in 150 years, on this earth, this veil of tears. It has been a century & a half of endless fear....still it is near. With feather not with hammer I would wish to lightly brush the sleep-fast windows of this dozing world where my brother, unwitting, lies innocently curled as the flames leap lush and the rank winds yammer...tongues lick the door, lap the sashes. Wingless, I clamber; songless scream surrounded by patterns of private withdrawal as obscure in their psychology as they are transparent in their very noisey and noiseless external shape. Ron Price 5 March 2008

There is the film"The Matrix," but there are all sorts of matrices....I writeabout a few of them here. _____________ Eliot's Wasteland matrix: There will be, I am inclined to think, many who will read this work and find it not to their taste. And I am reminded of what one writer said of T.S. Eliot and his poem The Wasteland, perhaps the most famous poem of the twentieth century. That poem, The Wasteland, he wrote “was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life." What a reader gets from a work is quite an idiosyncratic reality. It is something I have little control over once I have let loose this work. In the end a writer must please himself. Gibbon became an autobiographer for the same reason he became an historian: to see a pattern, a plan in what might appear from a distance to be a welter of haphazard, chaotic or contradictory experience. I have done the same. I do not expect my readers to see the same pattern. A Developing World Order Matrix: DISTANT GARDENS The second century(1944-2044) is destined to witness...the first stirrings of that World Order, of which the present Administrative System is at once the precursor, the nuc- leus and pattern-an Order which, as it slowly crystallizes and radiates its benign influ- ence...will proclaim the coming of age of the whole human race. -Shoghi Effendi, The Advent of Divine Justice, pp.72-73. The Parthenon, or whatever, is universal because it can continuously inspire new personal realizations in experience. It is simply as impossibility that any one today should experience the Parthenon as the devout Athenian contemporary citizen exper- ienced it...The enduring art-product...was called forth by something occasional, something having its own date and place. But what was evoked is a substance so formed that it can enter into the experience of others and enable them to have more intense and more fully rounded out experiences of their own. -John Dewey, Art as Experience, Capricorn Books, NY, 1958(1934), p. 109. And so it is universal and will go on being so down the halls of time, enriching and intensifying the experience of those who are willing to share in its beauty, to experience it as something new, something mine, to which I give the meaning, reordering colour and shape in relation to myself, to experience delight and overcome the inchoate, restricted, apathetic, tepid, fearful, conventional, routine through some expansion, intensification, fullness: ordering matter through form, on this journey to these far places, these distant gardens. Ron Price 23 December 1995 My Music Martrix: GUITAR + SHOCKS = POETRY "Where formerly he could be moved to song, he can do nothing now, he must dig down deeper. One would say that the shock of suffering and vision breaks down, one after another, the living sensitive partitions behind which his identity is hiding. He is harassed, he is tracked down, he is destroyed...He dies and is reborn in and with poetry.....He discovers an essentially free, objectless, creativity in poetry. With each poem, the poet creates a world and savours it." Such are Maritain's words and they have a certain resonance with my own thoughts, except I still can sing and do, although not often. -Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, New American Library, NY, 1953, pp.130-177. I was soaked in music in the ‘60s and like a wandering minstrel for twenty-five years I took that ubiquitous guitar, moved to sing, to song, the pioneer singer. But the shocks kept coming; the fires died. There was nothing left to sing, except dry bones deep down on the edges of my tongue, somewhere in my heart. In my brain a new music did I find, a certain verbal sound filled with thought and meaning deep in the womb, of some poetic intuition with tact, subtlety, to express the inexpressible in common speech, human voice: close to my heart, defining what my thoughts are like, conferring nobility on words. Still did I sing old songs for old folks, last notes dredged-up for occasions to try to bring a little joy to withered faces, last breaths before death carried them away.1 1 So it was that once a month I joined a small choir of 4 to 8 people who sang at Ainsley House for senior citizens here in George Town. Ron Price 22 December 1995/ 25 April 2003. The world's spiritual history matrix: UNSURPASSED HOLINESS Ours is the duty.....to play our part, however small, in this greatest drama of the world’s spiritual history. -Shoghi Effendi, 21 March 1930, in The World Order of Baha’u’llah, USA, 1974, p.26. Even when all these marble edifaces with their inaccessible mysteries, their attendant gardens are complete we are still faced with ordinary dust. The domestic orange trees will still be as unendearing as ever, contented perhaps in their green universe, having been taught submission (you can tell by their roundness). The geraniums will still be as pedestrian and obtuse as ever. The only thing you’ve got here, mate, is what you have lavishly invested with your aspiration and belief. You can grow weary of nightingales and peacocks, the uselessness of words, the fruitlessness of speculation. You’ll find here among the frail petals no formula for perfection. The disinterested cypresses, even though they point heavenward, will offer no certain answer to your questions. The jasmine may captivate your senses and paralyse your will, but the sense of urgency will not leave you nor this place for some time; for the hour is perilous and dark and the rush of history is moving toward the climax of a spiritual drama of staggering magnitude which so few are yet aware: be warned! Just resume your ordinary life with its deadlines and schedules. The taxi will soon speed you to your destination. The airport can sell you a postcard of the place which will soon be the stage for the enactment of several critical acts in a play of unsurpassed holiness. Have a safe trip home. Ron Price 28 December 1995 The Matrix on Mt. Carmel: I CAN SEE YOU NOW I have found it difficult in the last several years to get my mind off the Arc that is being built on Mt Carmel. It fills me with profound pleasure and ardent expectations. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 23 December 1995. For if we look back at one hundred years of an unexampled history of unremitting progress, we also look forward to many centuries of unfolding fulfillment of divine purpose...incrementally realized.... -Universal House of Justice, Ridvan, 1992, p.1. I can see you now: close and distant, near and far, with pregnant and tragic import, loosening and tightening, expanding and contracting, separating and compacting, soaring and drooping, rising and falling, dispersive and scattering, hovering and brooding, unsubstantial lightness, massive blow-- such is the stuff you are made of, up on that hill, over there, infinitely diversified, but I can express you here: the significant, the relevant, compressed and intensified in some exalted rising, surging and retreating, the sudden thrust, the gradual insinuation until I am obsessed with your wonder and can hardly take my mind off of you: the enduring, the voluminous, the solid, room, filling, power, energy of position and motion, rightness in placing. And so I am in poised readiness to meet your surrounding forces, to persist, to endure with some energy and some opportunity for action with my unique experience, gradually letting you yield to me in the changing light and moods, your enduring sacredness and charm and your monumental register of cherished expectations. Ron Price 23 December 1995 The Gothic Cathedral Matrix: A SWEET NEW LIFE "People entering Gothic cathedrals left behind their life of material cares and seemed to pass into a different world," writes Kenneth Clark as he makes his feelings of the arts contagious in his book Civilization. In other ages buildings were constructed simply to give pleasure. Twentieth century wars have destroyed many of these buildings in a fit of modern barbarism. As this was taking place, as this barbarism was hacking into the evidences of civilization humans had erected over many centuries, a small and embryonic community that followed the teachings of its prophet-founders, the Bab and Baha'u'llah, began to erect new symbols of a new civilization.-Ron Price with thanks to Kenneth Clark, Civilization, Pelican Books, 1969, p. 167. It was an age of minarettes that staggered the imagination, built high into the sky, immense heaps of stone and glass and aluminium. It was also the end of the Heroic Age and the start of the Formative Age and they used this social art, architecture, to help us lead fuller lives, to touch life at many points, to give us that douceur de vivre, that sweetness of life at places all over the world. Ron Price 29 May 2003 _______________NO MORE MATRICIES_________________________

MATRIX The film The Matrix was released in Australia the very week I taught my last classes as a full-time professional teacher, April 8th 1999. I had been teaching for thirty years. I won't summarize the details of the plot and all the characters. But some of the theme is as follows: a fundamental discovery is made about the world that it doesn't exist. It's actually a form of Virtual Reality designed to lull people into lives of blind obedience to the system. People obediently go to their jobs every day without knowing that Matrix is the wool that has been pulled over their eyes. The reality of life is that people are slaves. The rebels want to crack the framework that holds this Matrix in place thus freeing humankind. Some believe a messianic One will lead a social uprising; this messianic One will possess both mind power and physical strength. -Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 4 November 2006 with thanks to Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, March 31st 1999. The world has been in a great sleep from which it is slowly waking thanks to that messianic One and the uprising has begun silently, unobtrusively, for the revolution is global and out of man's control--it is also spiritual--having begun within the Shaykhi school of the Ithna- Ashariyyih sect of Shiah Islam. But don't tell anyone--it's the best kept secret-non-secret in the world and it is slowly rising from the obscurity in which it has been shrouded for 160 years. Ron Price 4 November 2006