 Good morning friends, Dr. Khan, Dr. Boyle if you're in the room, friends. It would be helpful to start from the first slide, so I did that. Isn't it lovely to gather at a learned conference? You know the learned conference by itself is a industry, various universities, various research organizations. They have annual conferences in which researchers present their findings. But rarely have I seen them start with beautiful devotions of the kind that we did this morning. And that sets us apart, and it gives us an intimation of the civilization to come. The other comment I wanted to make before I start the substantive remarks is that as you have noticed, of course, in the Bahá'í community, in the Bahá'í world, we now rarely have large conferences of the type that we are participating this weekend. And so speaking in front of an audience is a habit that has been forgotten to some extent, so you would take it easy on me as they say. But I wanted to bring to you the love and the admiration of the contental board of counselors in America. I just come to this conference from a five-day plenary meeting of that board which was held in Florida last week. And if you wonder, well, what were you doing, you know, a full week, five full days huddled in a room, why are you not in the field? Why are you not in the trenches? This was our exercise on reflection. It was an exercise in learning. And for three full days of that five-day, the mode of learning that we engaged in was to look at the profiles of various clusters around the continent and to try to learn what we understand, try to understand what we can learn from the activities that have taken place in the last three months. It's a little bit like a botanist who discovers a new species of a plant and for the first time observes the growth of this plant. And the botanist is not quite sure what branch will shoot next. What color flowers may come out of this new species that have just been discovered? And so it is very much a learning of something that is organic, that is growing, and we wondered at the beauty, at the rapidity, at the pace at which it is growing. You know, if somebody was saying if you're growing carrots and you want to see how it grows, the worst thing you want to do is to pull it out of the earth to take a look at it and see how it has grown. So we have to have different modes and means of observing it. But I wanted to let you know that the sentiment certainly is that of admiration and of love to a particular measure for the North American Baha'i community. And I mentioned both Canada and the United States because we share this inheritance together to be the co-heirs to be the spiritual descendants of the dawn breakers, essentially. And nothing in this or any of the previous plants has changed that. Let no one mislead us to think that that responsibility has been lifted from our shoulders. When the organizers of this beautiful conference asked me to say some words here, I thought since I often speak about the plan, this would be an opportunity to speak both about the plan and our identity as a scholar. So here is the menu for those of you who can read. I mean if you are sitting in a place that you can read. One cannot deliver any talk about the Baha'i faith without first speaking about unity, the overarching principle that underlies everything that we do. To summarize the list it would be introduction, the body and the summary. But we will take a look at really the interplay about our own identity as individuals and as communities and as the scholars and how it will relate and interplay with the plan that we are currently executing. We do have a new vocabulary. That means the language of our discourse has changed to such an extent that it has happened to several people. If for a few months we happen to be out of touch for one reason or the other, family or work or whatever reason. And we come back and there are new words that we do not know what is its significance. At the One National Convention, the friends ask the national speaker, can you please publish a glossary? And this set of new words gives rise to new discussions. I have not seen the Baha'i community at any time so much engaged in discussion, in exploration, in thinking, in asking questions. The question could be framed in different forms. Some are, is this activity still okay? Or how do I change this particular function in order to integrate it better with the plan? But the more questions we ask, the more we have to think. And the more thinking that goes on, not only among select few but throughout the community, the more felt fertile becomes the land out of which spiritual growth will come out. The questions are both of a nature that engages the mind and the heart as we explore new concepts. So the very fact that friends are asking questions should be viewed in a positive light. And that is really in a sense an accomplishment of these series of plans. It forces us to think, to examine, to ask questions even at the expense that sometimes it leads to tension. Despite that, it is a positive development. We are learning how to learn. And we see that not every segment of the community, whether you want to divide that segment by geography or any other criteria, that not every segment is necessarily at the same stage. After all, we even refer to our clusters of Bahá'í communities as belonging to different stages. And that is a feature that also indicates a healthy positive development. It is not that we wish everybody was an A cluster. It is not that we wish that everybody was a graduate of book seven. That there is a dynamism that the system always allows for new entry. Those of you who are familiar with the language of the training institute to the expansion at the base of the pyramid. Because we all are learning how to learn. And you have noticed, I am certain in your scholarly endeavors, that words that used to have certain meanings based on cultures, whether it be Judeo-Christian culture, Islamic culture, or of the Eastern religions. These words after has been uttered by the new manifestation, they acquire new meaning. For instance, if you look at the word justice, most people, the proverbial man on the street, justice will have something to do with courts and punitive measures. And that's what justice means. To the Bahá'í's justice is a faculty of human soul. It has something to do with fair-mindedness. It has to do with our vision. It has to do with our mode of operation. It has nothing to do with a segment of professional part of the society that administers justice. So that's what one example. There are many other examples where words begin to acquire new meanings. And we see that also in this current environment. Many of you are aware that a new book has been published this year. It is called The Tabernacle of Unity. It is a collection of five tablets by Bahá'u'lláh. So we can sort of bet. And we say of all the books that was published in the world in 2006, which one would you think will be still around ten years, fifty years, a hundred years, a thousand years, ten thousand years from now? Does that not indicate the significance of that publication? Some extracts of which had been translated previously by The Beloved Guardian, but now we have the full official translation. It is addressed to a group of five different individuals, of Zoroastrians. And so in that sense it is a subject of study for us to understand the relationship of the manifestation of God with that population. The tenderness with which Bahá'u'lláh speaks teaches us something new and puts it in complete contrast to other passages by the Blessed Beauty. For example, when he speaks of the priesthood in the Kitab-e-Iran, we see that the tone of language is completely different. So the first two tablets, let me describe a little bit about that, the facts of it. This gentleman, Manikchi Sahib, Zoroastrian born in India, rose to some prominence in the Zoroastrian community, was sent as an emissary to Iran, essentially to protect the Zoroastrians against the Ghajars. And he met Bahá'u'lláh in Baghdad, and both as a result of that meeting and as a result of his witnessing of the sacrifices of the early martyrs of the faith, he became a lifelong admirer of the cause. Did he ever become a Bahá'u'lláh? Perhaps not. Not in the sense of certainly there was no administration, there's no registration to apply that test. But also we will question if that test is valid at all. As we learn in the new plan and we move forward, there are Bahá'u'lláh communities, entire Bahá'u'lláh communities that define an admirer of the manifestation of Bahá'u'lláh as somebody who is engaged in a process of learning of his teaching, of his revelation. That's another way of defining who a Bahá'u'lláh is. Somebody who is engaged in a lifelong learning of the revelation given to us by Bahá'u'lláh. It's also interesting that he hired, employed Mirza Abul-Fazail. You know his first name, Abul-Faz, means the father of virtue, or virtue we can say. And Bahá'u'lláh called him the father of all virtues, Abul-Fazail in plural. But through this association, Mangchi Sahib requested a tablet from Bahá'u'lláh and he asked it to be revealed in pure Persian. Those who speak this language, it is like saying, can you write something in English without using any Latin words in it? Only words that come from that root. The celebrated passage with which we are all familiar is an extract from that tablet. The all-knowing physician has his finger on the pulse of mankind. He perceives the disease and prescribes in his unerring wisdom the remedy, the use of analogy by Bahá'u'lláh himself when he's trying to convey a difficult concept. We do that often in our conversation. Scientists do that frequently. Let me take an aside and say that I was a student many moons ago in London at the Imperial College and we had a professor in electrical engineering who came one day to the classroom and in those days we had chalk on board. I don't think you've seen those things recently, but he began by describing the flow of a river and we were all surprised because this was a class in electromagnetics, not in fluid dynamics, but he began to describe that and put some parameters in and reinterpreted a few symbols and derived a set of equations which applied to electromagnetism, but he started from fluid. And then he raised his both hands like this up and he said 2,000 years ago there was another man who spoke in parables. I related that anecdote to show that analogies and anecdotes are illuminating in all spheres of endeavor. This particular tablet now that we have it in full reading it in context will show to us not only the content of the words but many many new shades of meaning that can be derived from it by understanding the question that the that Sahib Mangchi had, and how Bahá'u'lláh chose to answer them. This is another extract from that tablet. Every age has its own problem and every soul its particular aspiration. Be anxiously concerned with the needs of the age. Ye live in and center your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements. Certainly we can read this passage to make reference to progressive revelation but there are many other ways of reading this passage. The age ye live in could also refer to the decade, not necessarily the thousand years, the millennium, but the decade in which we live. The circumstances that is contemporarily affecting humankind and to center your deliberations on its exigencies and requirements brings up the concept of focus. How not to consider all matters at all times. So these are my musings I agree but if you permit we can read it to illustrate that each one of us can delve in these writings and read them with different colored lenses if you like with different vantage points and explore them in our groups. Among the things in this tablet that Bahá'u'lláh mentions are these words he says oh people words must be supported by deeds for deeds are the true test of words without the former the latter can never quench the thirst of the yearning soul nor unlock the portals of vision before the eyes of the blind. At one level this is of course understood sure you must do what you say you must not preach one thing and not and and do the opposite that is understood but that is only one level of understanding it. See the words of Bahá'u'lláh he says without the former meaning without the deeds the latter can never quench the thirst okay but nor can it unlock the portals of vision so without doing something we cannot acquire a vision by merely sitting in a room smoked filled or otherwise and exploring words alone and correlating some books with other books just by doing that alone of course we will discover certain relationships no doubt let us not denigrate that activity but if you want to have to unlock the portals of vision before our eyes then the recommendation from Bahá'u'lláh is that we engage in doing something in deeds that deed itself could be educational it could be related to welfare it could be related to all kinds of concerns of humanity but it is deeds that really open our eyes it would be impossible for me to enumerate all the concepts in the tablet this is granted you know it was also difficult I know the Bahá'u'lláh community has studied the letters of the Universal House of Justice and we engage in that study since December 27th of 2005 that has been the focus of the study of the believers of that letter of the House of Justice I can tell you the personal anecdote that when I returned back from that historic conference I thought it would be my duty to try to help the friends understand the letter so I sat down and tried to summarize the letter which is eight and a half pages and 32 paragraphs long and after I was done with my summary it was longer so I decided to use the words themselves so here is another concept that Bahá'u'lláh addresses in that tablet the incomparable friend see how he characterizes himself the prisoner of akka refers to himself as the incomparable friend the path to freedom has been outstretched haste and either onto how many generations of Bahá'u'lláh scholars you think it will take to explore the meaning of freedom in the context of this single tablet the word has been so misused many people have stopped using it oh sorry let's see if I can make sure let's see if we can get the technology to work properly for us I apologize go to the appropriate um technology has that doesn't it you press the wrong button and you're done for the maybe we can start from there and try to work our way down a little bit yes we were talking about freedom and also these words of Bahá'u'lláh in that same tablet say oh ye that have eyes to see the past is the mirror of the future I think historians should be happy about that but also is this not a call for reflection it could be the past three months does not have to be the past millennium is the mirror of the future and as we examine the things that we have done in light of the you know it's like a little bit like a ping-pong you have the things you do and you have the things you read and if you only read and don't do then we are bound to be to go on some tangent theoretical line that may not benefit us or anybody else and if you only do the action without going back to take our bearing in the guidance then we are likely to wander in the desert so so this concept of getting the two doing things and reflecting on it and then doing it somewhat differently the second tablet let me talk a little bit about that this tablet from Bahá'u'lláh was sent to Mangchi Sahih he received it he read it he must have been enchanted by the beauty of the words because just from the literally point of view it is really an incomparable tablet but he had asked certain specific questions and he could not understand from the words of Bahá'u'lláh what happened to his questions so he complained this message was transmitted of course through Mirza Abul-Fazl to Mirza Aghajan the emanuances of Bahá'u'lláh and then Bahá'u'lláh chose to do something that gives us a rare glimpse into his world he revealed a tablet in the voice of Mirza Aghajan not his own voice so he's no longer addressing from the summit of glory he is writing as though the secretary is writing but every word we know is dictated by Bahá'u'lláh himself revealed word and he wrote it not to Mangchi Sahih but to his secretary Mirza Abul-Fazl so now this is a correspondence between the two secretaries and at this level now Bahá'u'lláh can take up a new level of discourse rather than the broad brush with which he painted the first tablet in which he imbued such wisdom and such knowledge that can be explored for thousands of years instead of that he could now climb down to a narrow level and there do a tit for tat okay use asked these questions and the answer will be the following so as you read this dialogue it gives us a rare view as I said that if somebody asks us a question of the kind that Mangchi Sahih wrote how far can we broaden the topic how much can we answer the question in non-confrontational manners you know in any discussion if somebody asks a specific answer a question and you give a specific answer beyond the dialogue there is the interplay between the two spirits the questioner is formulating some uh intellectual question but beyond that there is a question of submission there is a question of adherence there is a question of trust there is a question can i take you as my guide that's the real question that's the question that the soul is asking even though the intellect is asking something else so if we give such a convincing answer that the poor fellow has no room to wiggle we have attained ascendancy but have we led the inquire to the source of his life that's the question so the comparative study of these two tablets of Allah gives us a way to say if somebody asked this particular question for example one of the questions was about progressive revelation the question was we see there are multiple religions and each one have a claim for exclusivity but then we see for example that some some religions do not accept adherence into their religion they're not evangelical if you like in our modern world but others are and are very assidious in that and really try to achieve conversion at fairly assertively which one is correct and Bahá'u'lláh's answer is that the all-knowing position has its finger on the pulse of mankind further as Bahá'u'lláh is recounting the question providing the specific answer then he says however the answer that i gave you was latent in this passage just you fail to see it so i do not know in my own private study of the writings any pair of tablets that provides such a clear such a beautiful dialogue from which we can learn how to broaden the base of our discourse how to move from exclusive to inclusive from argumentative to principled and from rational only to a spiritual inherent in those discussions and in many questions are dichotomies is it this way or is it that way and one of the things we are learning in this plan particularly is to go beyond false dichotomies let me take an aside the universal house of justice the source of all good the freed from all error the last refuge of a tottering civilization is not a mere administrative body is not merely a governing organization it is also the educator of mankind and they fulfill this role by translating those principles enshrined in the tablets of Bahá'u'lláh illumined with the interpretations of the master and of Shoghi Effendi and translating it in a vocabulary that we can relate to in our post-modern life and that will help us the scholars to bridge between the kind of discourse that we inevitably have to have with the non-Bahá'u'lláh world and what merely is our own religious reflection so we have seen two documents from that source the December 27th letter which gives the content of the plan and which gives us an understanding of a decade roughly the five years that passed and the five years that we are living through coming and then this document was followed by the relevant message which gives to us the vision of a century so that if we are tempted to think that the new plan new and different as it is is somewhat disconnected with the old that we are immediately corrected in this they gave us just the four months time to fall into that trap and then corrected us yes the new plan is very different because growth requires that we do something today which is different than what we did previously every growing teenager will let you know that but it is also we have to see the unity the fundamental connectedness between this plan and our previous activities these are the words of the supreme body in the resvan message of this year and towards the future they can look with the confidence that is conferred only on those whose resolve is steeled through experience confidence has something to do with faith the resolve doesn't come only from confidence it also comes from the thing we see you know this is really no different than asking for miracles that's what the early believers of some early dispensations did they stood up in front of the manifestation of god and said show me a miracle so that i can submit to you so that i be assured that what you are telling me is the truth and that's what the believers are engaged in only if you could see it is more difficult to see when you are working in one study circle one cluster more difficult to see but and that's why we have this system the system of the institution that works through the teaching center you have already the statement in the document called institution of the counselors in which they say that the institution of the counselors through the operation of the international teaching center has a mechanism if you like that will harness the collective learning of the Bahá'í community throughout the world and communicate this so that friends in other clusters can also learn from that so this but reading some more of that is again more reading increasingly friends are learning to do this i was in there was a there was a conference of the local spiritual assemblies who gathered together to study the plan and they did some studies in the morning and sure enough in the afternoon they all broke up in the middle of the of their gathering they broke up and there was 150 home visits planned for them for these members to go and do in this strange town that they have come of course home visits it's something else that you do in your own neighborhood preferably because you want to be able to maintain that and continue with that but just to break the the cultural barriers this was done and everybody comes and says yes now i know many aha moments let me spend a few minutes on the subject of scholarship we know that they we talked about every word having a new meaning scholarship also has a new meaning in the vahai faith the man the proverbial man in the street would tell you scholarship is confined to a few learned men who have able pens and who may be charismatic performance of talks or whatever that is the group we call skull in fact the word itself brings to mind thoughts of separation of exclusivity of elitism because these are the words that are associated with scholar in the non-vahai world to us the vahai scholarship is something that every vahai does just like every vahai prayers it is part of our daily function it is deeply ingrained in our learning and we learn through prayer through meditation through various community activities and through individual initiative through individual you know that this plan is principally given to the individual principally the plan is given to the individual the institutions if you read the paragraph is to support to encourage they are the institutions are the cheerleaders the real players are the individuals and among all individuals the singular person to whom one full paragraph is dedicated paragraph eight of December 27th is the tutor the tutor i would not be surprised if that individual emerges as and of course one day everybody could be or large number of people could be tutors but that person emerges as the central player as we move on in our learning and acting as we say the tip of the arrow of learning but let me go back to the roots of the scholarship and the words of bahá'u'lláh in the Kitab-e-Aqdás I thought we first look very rapidly and briefly at the context paragraph 160 of the Kitab-e-Aqdás bahá'u'lláh begins a new topic different from the previous paragraph where he begins by saying promote he the development of the cities so he is obviously intent to speak about civilization and then he establishes the premise on which we will build this new civilization by giving us in paragraph 161 the principle that he shall not be asked of his doings let me take an aside in mathematics we know that it is possible to develop a complete mathematical discipline a complete set of theorems that are self-consistent and coherent and there are more of these more than one is possible one you know everybody knows called the Euclidean geometry and another one called Minkowski geometry and so forth they are logical consistent coherent self closed if you wish but they are different from each other because the assumptions on which they were built were different in the Euclidean geometry we start with a triangle and we say if the sum of the three angles adds up to 180 degrees we call that a planar geometry the Euclidean geometry and from that we derive a whole mathematics if you assume that the sum of these three angles is somewhat more than 180 degrees you're not wrong it just means that you are not sitting on a flat piece of paper you are on a curvature and on that curvature this happens the angles don't add up to 180 and you have an entirely new mathematics there is no within those systems there is no way to say which one is right which one is wrong i use that analogy to show that if we start with materialistic assumptions we will have a materialistic science that gives rise to a materialistic civilization and from within its own parameters it is undefeatable doesn't mean it's right it just means that through the use of tools of argumentation you cannot defeat it if you start with spiritual assumptions you will develop a spiritual civilization which is equally undefeatable there is one way that we can tell which one of those two is correct because one leads to a divine civilization and the other leaves to a bankrupt society that falls apart because there is no correspondence between the theory and the reality just like how do we know the physical world is euclidean or minkowskian is by to see if there's a correspondence so so bahá'u'lláh begins by the assumption he shall not be asked of his doings and then he gives the next principle endowed with the most perfect constancy he addresses the divines they learn it if you like the scholars and of them he says that with their own eyes will they behold god if i may be allowed to interject if they adhere to the premises that was just established and then the beauty is a second phrase and with their own lives will they render him victorious another measure given to us by bahá'u'lláh so another principle measure not the book of god with your selfish desires then he gives the example to show how this great learned man rejected the claims of the bahá'u'llh yet a sifter of the wheat and barley accepted it to show that formal education may not be correlated necessarily with receptivity or courage or inventiveness or being able to undergo paradigm shift then he says this statement this is the cause that has made all your superstitions and idols to tremble and calls on the divines to tear the veils asunder in such wise that the inmates of the kingdom will hear them being rent what a beautiful statement what a beautiful statement and then this is the paragraph in the agdas this day it behooves who so has quaffed the mystic wine of everlasting life from the hands of the loving kindness of the lord his god the merciful to pulsate even as a throbbing artery in the body of mankind that through him may be quickened the world and every crumbling bone that is our mission you want to adopt the mission statement this is our mission but quite clearly in the conception of bahá'u'lláh the scholar as we said is not an exclusive the person is not elitist and the activity is not exclusive but it applies to all of us and this plan by the way has this feature i'm certain that you have come across this one of the features of the current five-year plan is to make sure we cannot create a class of bahá'u'lláh presenters charismatic speakers which would in effect replace the divines but rather we lowly individual bahá'u'lláhs through the activities that we refer to as the core activities the four core activities through the operation of that instrument each one of us becomes a scholar by reading delving meditating doing reflecting so the posture of us as a scholar is to adopt and welcome change in fact change should be you can't beat them might as well join them change should be planned in our life disruption is good of course discipline yes don't go coat and so on so said disruption is good but coming out of the comfort zone you know just when we were quite happy coming together in our centralized children classes wonderfully and getting involved with our bahá'u'lláh communities in our deepening and so on the house of justice is essentially sending us pioneering into our non-bahá'i neighborhoods and the same spirit of heroism is called for as we value process and engage in self-service and we there's a tablet from bahá'u'lláh i have not quoted it here that talks about the rank and unity that yes we do have rank in the cause but the beauty of this cause is that those who occupy ranks do not regard our unaware of its existence they do not seek rank nor do they glory in it so we should not wear the mantle of our scholarship check that out at the door as we go through our activities and it is that sense of humility that really helps us foster creativity avoid rigidity or fanaticism and integrate ourselves together with everybody else in the community aspirations um i'll have to go a little bit faster and some of this material a new state of mind the affirmative statement abroad in our world community there is a heightened awareness of the value of the process the necessity of the planning and the virtue of systematic action really i could take any one of these phrases and and we can explore at great depth these these aspects the the characteristic of the new culture is that we are not consumers of this religion that's the new culture and to the extent that bahá'i communities have in their comfort become become consumers of the faith this plan disrupts it and generates new dynamics much more positive much more elevating what the bahá'i community currently faces you know as we try to do we have done our in training institute books and we have tried to do the practices and sheepishly we did go and visit a bahá'i in his home until we learn how this thing works it really has to do with courage and i couldn't offer a better statement than the how laws own that this is not a cause for the faint of heart this is the arena of insight and detachment of vision and upliftment where none may spare on their chargers save the valiant horsemen of the merciful we are the cavalry among the hosts service is another word that has been redefined used to be in the context of committees and institutions now service in the bahá'i community means studying the faith together with some non-bahá'is or praying together with the seekers of truth or educating the children of mankind or having programmed for the junior youth that is by the way the fourth core activity is something that we started at the beginning of this new plan and therefore we are not behind anybody in fact uh i don't have the time to go through this with anecdotes and examples but clusters across north america one after the other particularly in those that have been able to quickly get past the dichotomies and engage in the field of action we see such receptivity north america you know most of the messages have two paragraphs one says if you are very receptive and you have so many hundreds of declarations in the first in your expansion phase then do this but if you are less north america is not the second category western europe may be north america is not because the people of america believe in god the tablet of abul bahá in which he speaks about focus the analogy of the lens and the sunlight if you allow me i will move forward and to be scientific you see the beloved guardian wrote that the faith is scientific in its method if you find yourself you cannot find anybody else but if you find yourself to be rigid it's okay to be structured it's not okay to be rigid about that structure where exactly the line is is something we all need to work through then we should ask ourselves am i scientific am i methodical i will skip through this in the interest of time but i want to mention this one of the friends was saying well you know you are speaking with the scholars you have to have a few words that sound scholarly so here this is work done by none but by essentially people most of them christian theologians who are grappling with the concept of harmony of science and religion and who increasingly find that a fundamentalist interpretation of religion will render them irrelevant so they are turning to new interpretations physical sciences the hard sciences and then the more softer ones life sciences and so on so physics and chemistry if you think of a hierarchy hierarchy of how we know things and put at the base of this hierarchy the physical sciences and then above that life sciences neuro sciences social sciences and so forth then we can say that the softer sciences cannot have a rule or a law that contradicts laws of physics that's meaning that a harder science constrains the softer sciences but on the other hand the softer sciences do have they do have some emerging laws that are not reducible to the harder sciences meaning this if you give some money in an act of charity to a poor person this action cannot be completely described by the differential equations that describe the physical movement and the including what goes on inside your neuro system so the emergence meaning that the upper level laws something emerges so human action must conform to the laws of physics but also to the ethics okay if we think of this hierarchy and then say where does divine revelation fit into this scheme it will have to be at the top of the hierarchy because it is the softest of the soft sciences in that sense meaning that religion cannot have any teaching that contradicts the known laws of science but it would have plenty things that science has no access to that way placing the utterances of the divine manifestations at the top level of the epistemological hierarchy ensures both religious conformity to basic sciences and illumination and guidance for such sciences and i will close by these remarks that everything we do including our study of interaction between science and religion has to be viewed as a part of a spiritual enterprise here is a tablet from apple boy in which he says that god's cause is the spirit unalloyed it's only army is the love of god it's only joy the clear wine of his knowledge it's only battle the expounding of the truth and then these words habibah says it's one crusade is against the insistent self you know we have many different kinds of selves in the by faith in the writings the rational self so on here is a reference to the insistent self i don't i have never met an insistent soul so i cannot talk about that but that is the one crusade of the cause and if we can overcome that we have overcome all things thank you