 You know the only reason people stood up for members of the House of Justice was To show their love and respect for the institution. There's no other reason and I'm not a member of the institution We stood up last night for that Incredible address by the counselor because we were pulled out by our hearts. We couldn't remain in our seats having heard those words Let me say Well, yes, I would be astounded that we didn't have to do something like that Have having walked down ten flights of stairs because of space vehicles in the lobby or otherwise engaged As one whose relationship with technology of any kind is one of the deepest hostility I'm only surprised for the people who are devoted to it. I always surprised that it doesn't work Nobody can find the light switch Well, the only consolation Friends is that we God-willing are all going to heaven And yet all of it is going to hell Nothing it or its creators can do about that Alhamdulillah Yeah, I Like to feel that we're done You know anniversaries have always figured prominent We're very late and I'm gonna barrel through this talk I don't have any option as fast as I can and I can speak pretty rapidly. I hope you can follow me Anniversaries have always figured very prominently in the life of the Baha'i community shogi attendees You know organize many of this most important communications around them and Apart from focusing our attention on the lives of the central figures These anniversaries provide vantage points. Is that off an echo? Bandage points from which you can gain perspective on where we've come from and hopefully where we're going and permit me to say I don't wish to contradict the art of the Committee or its organizers, but it's the 30th not the 29th anniversary. This is the 29th conference But the Association of Ohio Studies was formed 30 years ago. So this is a wonderful nice round figure to be celebrating here It goes without saying or an ought to that Intellectual leadership was from the very beginning one of the distinguishing features of the life of the cause Obviously first of all the fact that the revolutionary message of the Bob brought significantly the greatest response from the from his country's most searching and committed minds in the intellectual class of Iran Similarly the vast body of Bahá'u'lláh's ratings laid out a vision of a global society Way beyond the imagination of these contemporaries and he also laid out of course the processes of social transformation that will bring it about and And out of a house magisterial secret of driving civilization Provided for the unheeding people of his country a reality check Which the subsequent 125 years of unrelieved social moral intellectual Economic ruin is at last beginning to awaken them and of course since then Persia had produced these Distinguished figures like Mirza Bafaz al-Shra'ar al-Murad Dawoudi and so on and quite a number of others Very different was the intellectual life of the Bahá'u'lláh communities in the West To them and particularly the Canadian and American Believers a center of the covenant and trusted the executive ship of the divine plan and the guardian called on them to execute it They responded with pioneer projects throughout across the whole phase of the planet the creation and consolidation of this Complex of administrative institutions that serving as a nucleus and very patterned in the guardian's words of Bahá'u'lláh's world order Direction of the mother temple of the West in its others temples subsequently Devising of means for the public proclamation of the cause and the vindication of its independence in the eyes of civil authority the globalization of Efforts to defend the Bahá'u'lláh community and the cradle of the faith against persecution and in all of this the Bahá'u'lláh community was stunningly successful. There is nothing remotely like it in In history and on the face of the planet Patience, I'm gonna I'm gonna take every one of these minutes In the words of this document one common faith just released by the Bahá'u'lláh Center by the Universal House of Justice, I just want to read you what they say If I can make it out in the dim light up here As it enters the 25th 21st century the Bahá'u'lláh cause is a phenomenon unlike anything else the world has ever seen The Bahá'u'lláh community today comprises several million people representative of virtually every ethnic cultural and social and religious background on earth Administering their collective affairs without the intervention of clergy through democratically elected councils The many thousands of localities in which it is put down its roots are to be found in every country territory and significant island group The assertion that this community today May already constitute the most diverse and geographically widespread of any Organized body of people on the planet is unlikely to be challenged by anyone familiar with the evidence That is what history required That is what history Required of us That is what the world Desperately needed and that is what God himself through his manifestation commanded And that is precisely what we have done and what we are going to go on doing and absolutely nothing On the face of the planet will stop it And clearly this vast collective effort required intense intellectual activity a unique kind of intellectual awareness And an extraordinary capacity To harness intellectual resources for the needs of social and personal transformation What all of which brings us to our own association and As you've been told as you all know its conception arose From consultation at a goal given to the Bahá'í community of Canada by the Universal House of Justice in Rizwa in 1974 and In recent but to begin introducing courses on the Bahá'í faith in universities In January 75 The National Assembly brought a group of 30 people together For advice on the best way to proceed and that was out of that that the proposal for an association of this kind emerged The National Assembly adopted it its sister assemblies in the United States and Alaska enthusiastically joined their support It's not my purpose here to review the development But the achievement does call on call on us for at least some passing Appreciation Probably there'll be all kinds of papers written on this subject And so I don't need to go into details But the fact that there are today I've lost track someplace between 25 and 30 Affiliate associations around the world. There's a whole wills of learned articles Books and so on which have reached a lot of the intellectual life of the Bahá'í community. There are conferences like this that open Intellectual discussion to the whole community all believers who want to join And of course there are courses On the Bahá'í faith and have been for some time now in various universities on this continent and in europe What I want to draw our attention to is the impact of this process on the consciousness of the Bahá'í community On the one hand it reinforces our respect for what Bahá'u'lláh has called the possessors of arts and sciences Amongst men we are not people Who are so egalitarian that we don't recognize that god has endowed certain people with talents and capacities Much less that they have Willingly made the sacrifices to put these at the service of the cause and the community and we welcome that in these Conferences are an opportunity to experience it at first hand But also These activities open dimensions in the world of the mind for ordinary Bahá'ís everywhere The age of a privileged clergy is gone obviously Never to return and all the signs indicate that their modern ideological imitators face Even swifter extinction the 20th century showed that and those who are still busy at it Should be learning their lessons from that period of his that crucial period of history So the age now dawning is one in which analysis experimentation judgment and creativity Will increasingly be normal features of any Bahá'í life that deserves the name The word Bahá'í And the Bahá'í community should feel confident that it is in a vanguard of this Advancing process of the civilizing of human nature of the democratization of learning Now in the 1990s Marvelous thing happened the internet opened greatly expanded opportunities for this work. And so in The fall sometime of 1994 a great deal of interest was aroused in the Bahá'í community by the announcement of an American then Baháí academic That he was creating a list an internet list called what you call talisman for the discussion of scholarly subjects and in a relatively short time I don't know how many maybe 150 or so Bahá'ís were taking part And these exchanges benefited from new translations of all kinds Learned commentary and particularly An atmosphere that welcomed long long overdue challenges to Received Bahá'í lore the Katáubí here say that we had all been affected by first and this was being steadily dissolved The venture is guiding star Was to be the scientific spirit The spirit that made not only intellectual but ethical Rigorous ethical demands on those participating. This was the cause of truth and it must lead wherever truth led We Bahá'ís must fall And in the early exchanges On that list one cannot be held one cannot fail to be impressed more than impressed deeply moved by the seriousness the principle nature of the efforts that Bahá'ís everywhere were making To respect the spirit to respect the spirit of inquiry to respect the spirit of scientific rigor And that commitment survived increasing evidence that There were undercurrents political undercurrents that created divisiveness Criticism Attempts to deconstruct the Bahá'í community into totally artificial factions liberal and fundamentalist or whatever And equally artificial efforts to make some kind of a class distinction between What were termed the quote scholars and administrators the former being limited To the one narrow discipline or the two narrow disciplines of Islamic studies and religious studies to the exclusion of all the rest of the Insight and learning that the major scholarly disciplines and scientific disciplines would be will increasingly bring to bear On Bahá'u'llah's message and the latter the so-called administrators Ignoring completely the nature of the high institutions in which the it's like a flow of water in and out according to the processes of Election and and appointment there are no such people as administrators And it's obvious to anybody who is sincere that there are no such people Or as the councilor said last night They're most certainly ought not to be and anyone who sees his identity as an administrator Is headed for a very severe disappointment Um soon key passages in the guardians rendering of high texts were translated Deliberately translated in a way that left little room and implied little need for the institution that he embodied Ultimately participants found themselves engaged in the completely surreal experience of exploring scientifically A religious system in which they were explicitly forbidden to discuss That system's central and distinguishing feature It's like like an episode of Monty Python that you could Conduct any that you could take seriously this kind of activity we're not concerned here with matters of obedience and disobedience or faith and disbelief Or even deliberate mischief These are matters these are concerns for the individual conscience and if necessary obviously For the institutions of the faith our concern here is with the requirements of scholarship And clearly the talisman scheme was a flagrant violation of these standards Corrupt and deeply corrupting One that would not have been tolerated in any serious institution of higher learning in the western world Now where all this might eventually have led is difficult Fortunately to imagine and in the event the whole excursion ended abruptly One morning in february 1996 when the list owner Perhaps fatigued by marking papers or whatever he was engaged in Made the fatal irretrievable error of transmitting to the entire talisman membership A secret message intended only for a small group of his own collaborators who Rejoiced in the name Majnun, which means of course crazy I The choice was theirs not mine So within a few hours Depending on time zones several scorebehinds who until that moment Honestly believed they were engaged with like-minded people and a prosp in a project of serious scholarly and scientific research awoke to the realization That they were in fact dupes They were dupes of a totally cynical and very sophisticated scheme of intellectual manipulation a kind of scholarly confident scam For the Majnun group the talisman discussions had served merely as a vehicle for clandestine promotion of an ideological agenda of their own devising What had seemed On the outside to be independent reflections exchanged among Their scholarly members emerged in fact as carefully orchestrated argumentation Designed to shape the forum's thinking as I could have at this The message that slipped also reviewed also exposed all of the methods that they planned to use Including and Credibly an unembarrassed acknowledgement That Majnun and its talisman System was designed to follow in the footsteps of the totally discredited and pitiful figure of Mirza Ahmad Soran Now the complacent immorality of the scheme was breathtaking and obviously the Pain and distress caused to its victims Well, I don't minimize that for a moment So I don't want to diminish the seriousness of these features But rather I want to focus on the aspect of the episode that concerns Us and concerns the topic we're talking about here For all or most of the actual leaders For all or most of the participants I should say in talisman the intellectual as well as the moral Credentials of the ventures prime movers was simply fatally damaged Counselors intervene most of the leading members departed from the faith some remain in it very quiet and but that Side of the situation was taken care of by the institutions The fiasco has left several consequences On the one hand obviously it left a detritus in the form of a vast archive of tendentious argumentation Dupious or deliberately inaccurate translations and scurrilous denigration of all who disagreed with the majinan leadership And that's obviously going to run the risk of misleading at least some unwary non-Bahá'í researchers As to the nature of Bahá'u'lláh's message though one takes heart for the fact that Most serious academic researchers are well aware of the ideological shadows lurking on the periphery of their activities and are probably not going to be seriously Misled by it And by it and This is the important thing None of this has in any way undermined the Bahá'í community's commitment to the life of the mind On the contrary The community has had the healthy experience of seeing some of the most insensitive and important and often obscure Issues of the faith candidly explored discussed completely freely And and this is the point without any inhibiting restraint, whatever from Bahá'í administrative institutions And I repeat without the least inhibition from Bahá'í administrative institutions and on the contrary that was of justice very much encouraged the use of information technology institutions of Took a role only when the whole thing had been exposed And certain activities had certain actions had to be taken with respect to those Responsible We'll never know how many unspoken questions Unacknowledged misgivings secret misgivings and concerns were dissolved by this Incredible experience that the Bahá'í community had It had the opportunity of understanding what Abba Bahá said I've got a moment. I'm going to read you From secretive divine civilization page 33 34 He says For everything for everything god has created a sign and symbol and established standards and tests By which it may be known The spiritually learned must be characterized by both inward and outward perfections They must possess a good character and enlighten nature A pure intent as well as intellectual power, brilliance, discernment and so on And he says Whoever is lacking in these divine qualifications and does not Demonstrate these inescapable requirements in his own life Should not be referred to as learned and is not worthy to serve as a model for the community Well now in the in in the past such enterprises as Majnun had almost without exception succeeded They had succeeded in people who had certain prized skills and abilities Privileged elites who possessed these resources were able to seize the control of the intellectual life of whole communities of people religious people And to insert into the heart of successive faith what woman the one common faith message refers to as a An authority parallel with and even inimical in spirit To the revealed teachings on which the tradition was based kind of competing hegemony And to maintain this suffocating regime over this this intellectual life of large segments of mankind Literally for centuries And this is a point the that authority that was drawn on to accomplish this was an authority that was borrowed from transient Conceptions of the of the time centuries ago Gnosticism or Mithrilism or whatever it happened to be parenthetically of course the Majnun conceptual agenda borrowed from Ideas of the relativist and liberal political agenda that was widely prevalent In the concluding decades of the 20th century and that is now under increasing attack not from the by community God knows but from other segments of the intellectual world who are disabused of the postulates involved Bahá'u'lláh's covenant Has prevented this from occurring through our own community And one of the inestimable benefits of the talisman experience has been its demonstration through the power of the covenant of the radically new level of consciousness On which humanity has now entered spiritually morally and intellectually It's demonstrated this experience has demonstrated that access to the life of the mind Is the right of all people Not merely of a privileged minority And that it is founded on the revealed truth Which you find right at the beginning of gleaning so would somebody please turn that cell phone off We were supposed to tell you that at the beginning, I think I've got a cell phone. It doesn't work at all. So I don't ever have to worry In fact, I was up in my room when I arrived here To my Astonishment you can imagine my astonishment. I was stunned to pick up their telephone and there was silence I was desperately anxious to get in touch with a couple of my friends But I couldn't and then I remembered that some friends in Toronto had persuaded me to buy A cell phone they bought it for me and I had it and they had written out all the instructions and so on It was charged up to its The limit of its tiny little mind and I thought aha This is my opportunity. I looked up the telephone number Stop and think I looked up the telephone number of this hotel And I Took out my cell phone And it didn't work And I had been told it was the coolest cell phone available today I had bought it because it was narrow. It didn't wasn't like a metal big potato It was a little narrow thing. You slipped in your pocket. They told me it was very very cool regardless Not able to reach the hotel and they had to get dressed and go downstairs Um with the elevators, however, we're working. So I didn't have a problem with that I can't resist this To have the chance at a microphone to see what I really feel about technology But I honestly believe that through prayer meditation Consultation and collective effort we will ourselves get control of technology It won't be in my lifetime. I understand that And I hope I will see it from Wherever I am and and laugh Now it seems to me ironic that just as the talisman venture was imploding An entirely new stage in the process of behind learning was opening And I'm referring of course to the emergence of the institute process And most particularly the ruhi institute that had been conceived and shaped through the struggle And the suffering and the sacrifices Of the peoples of latin america People's of bolivia and ecuador and colombia and so on That's quite a Uh that should trigger quite something in our minds This institute was not devised in canada or the united states or europe It was divided and it was devised in that part of the world and we can confidently look outside this continent We've we've done the main part of our job after all we've done As executives of the divine plan what we were asked to do and of course we'll go on serving At all kinds of other things ahead of us But we can feel confident now that other communities very very very different from our own are arising With enormous capacities capacities often very different from our own And they will shape the cause they will come up with devices and so on The regional councils didn't originate in massachusetts or manitoba. They originated in india And we will see that go and we should be prepared we should welcome it We work god knows we work for it We spent a heck of a lot of money a lot of people have uploaded their lives and so on And now that is in process and the regional councils and the ruji institute are The first wave of that payback that we will be able to participate in It would be no exaggeration to say that the impact of the ruji institute on the Life of the Baha'i community is truly revolutionary From virtually every part of the world these days come reports of the vitality That the process has awakened in both individuals and communities Of vitality and intellectual as well as spiritual vitality reminiscent of the energy that introduced the faith into these regions Decades ago so back alive. It's like Um, I've never seen it, but I know in canada. I'm sure in the states too We're told that forest fires sweep through these huge forests as continent has And it's all gone and people are broken hearted to see their favorite trees destroyed and then Before you know it little green sprout shoots begin to come out of this Wilderness of cinders and the forest begins to restore itself And that is the Obviously the way of the faith It's the new stage that we have entered is characterized by a high level of coherence And also by a clarity of mind That expresses itself in a desire for purposeful social action I was going to talk a good deal more about this It would be Very totally unnecessary for me to do so After that brilliant address we heard last night from Councilor Birkin I can on it. I hope he's not in the room or he is in the room I hope he's someplace that he doesn't turn bright red, but I have to say I can honestly state that I have never heard so clear so cogent so prospect so perceptive a presentation of the very essence Of the institute process and its core activities as we were privileged to hear last night And I am immensely grateful that I was present on this occasion I hope I assume the address has been recorded and that will be made available widely throughout the world Because it captures Captures in only what a very short space of time it captures the essence of what we're engaged in So I don't have to repeat what he said But in the words of Abdu'l-Bahaz again that great treatise that he wrote to the Iranian people 125 years ago He says The whole population He's talking about the purpose of learning the nature and the purpose of learning The whole population should be protected in every way Every effort should be exerted to adopt a combination of all possible measures To raise up the word of God Increase the number of believers promote the faith of God and exalted And this of course is exactly what is occurring and as the This as the New cycles because the Ruhi Institute of course operates in cycles and we're coming to the end of one of these great cycles another one will follow and another one will follow that and These will assist the individual who has been awakened spiritually and intellectually Who is living in the creative word will assist him to make the connection between personal awakening and the advancement of Collectivities of any kind of the Baha'i community itself the clusters and then society as a whole and then ultimately an understanding of the covenant And then the preparation for actions that serve the humanitarian needs of humankind it is Truly it's a it's a mind-boggling enterprise. It has been set in motion and again We cannot fail to feel deeply touched that this emerged out of Latin America out of Terrible suffering people who people who could not even safely walk to a cluster meeting without being In fear of their lives who didn't have money who didn't have any transportation They'd have to walk because they had no other way to walk But it was out of that or with patient development that this marvelous system arose The Distinguished to me and all these remarks i'm making are Totally personal isn't my personal view and I hope Probably it's not necessary with a Baha'i audience like this, but I hope no one no individual in the audience will Connect what I have to say in any way with universal house of justice If it wants to say something it says it in black and white in English As translated into all the languages it's communicated throughout the world. We have a level playing field in the faith There's not some arcane secret knowledge that only those few people who are Brains are wired strongly enough to bear it are able to cope with Open to the whole The whole cause is open to all of its members. Obviously there are Personal things that assemblies are counseling people on that's a different matter or The legal efforts that are being made or political initiatives that are diplomatic Initiatives and until those are complete. Obviously they have to there's to be a degree of confidentiality But so far as the basic cause is concerned the teachings of fundamental beliefs that's available for all of us. There's no special privilege Knowledge that certain people have so please don't connect any comments that I mean with the house of justice These are my own views entirely And I want to say that for me I guess the most exciting Because I look to tend to look at everything historically, you know the French I want to say to mention the French in the United States. I guess I'll just take Barrel right on anyway Every language has its special gifts and French Can say you can say things in French if you can't say in English or any other language and French doesn't speak about education and speaks of formation The mind is for me and if you get if you're educated in the arts or in history or in Physics or what music or whatever it happens to be or I suppose one has to believe one has to suspend disbelief computer technology perhaps for all I know Your mind is formed that way and you see everything in that way So I tend to see everything historically because that was and so what I see in the Ruhi Institute it's tremendous success throughout the planet Is that it has thrown, you know in the jungle If you're going to build a bridge, I haven't built a bridge in a jungle in the jungle Then I have been there and I've been told all about it. The first thing they do is throw a line across the chasm Across some one line is thrown across And it's secured at the other end and that line makes possible the eventual construction of a whole bridge And then thousands of people pass across that bridge for years and years or decades for that matter That is what to me the Ruhi Institute has done It has thrown a line across What we thought was the unbridgeable chasm between mind and heart Between faith and reason that has afflicted the western world for the past past 500 years And on that line we will build a mighty bridge Which the masses of mankind will be able to cross back and forth in which the Chasm will cease to be of any significance because the chasm exists only in our minds no place else Um And I think the other thing that reads my result inevitably from that and we should take Tremendous satisfaction as Bahá'í is in this is that um This um Mighty enterprise that we're engaged in this intellectual enterprise is civilized civilizing of human nature Will increasingly call on the best that scientific and scholarly research can offer We're not going to accomplish this Just with prayer and meditation and reflection on the writings in children's classes and so on We're going to need the in the input of the very best that highly trained minds and spirits can contribute And The cause will provide The decision-making processes by which Those contributions can be focused where the need Exists and the cause will provide the financial resources You know, there's no problem with any democratic government in the western world From understanding what ought to be done The government of the united states of canada of britain and trance everyone understands It's applying it is persuading Different segments of the population that this needs to be done. That is the real challenge Scientists and scholars must many of them stand in Deep despair sometimes to see They offer to the decision-makers they offer the best that the mind can provide and they see it Set aside or squander or so on not because of any ill will not because we're ruled by wicked people Or even necessarily all that selfish people, but simply because we do not have a system that permits humanity collectively to function in the words of bahá'u'llah as one soul in one body to to To assess those opportunities and to accept them and then to apply them And let me say parenthetically That to hear this extraordinary Ruhi program and the Core activities that are related to it Challenged on the grounds that its insights and methodologies Are suited only to bolivian peasants and I heard that Strikes me as merely a damning Comment on an intellectual culture like our own That is profoundly and willfully ignorant about both human nature And the course of human history Brother comment seems superfluous um Well, I have reviewed in these remarks and I fear All too briefly three phenomena that shape the life of the mind Of the bahá'u'llah community over the past few decades The first the attempt of bahá'u'llah studies initiatives like this one To awaken believers to a wide in a wide range of countries to opportunities represented by serious scholarship The fact that This huge crowd is in this room and you go to Europe. You go to the far east. You go to India. You find the same thing Intensely desiring to understand intensely desiring knowledge This is a thrilling experience and it's happening everywhere throughout the Bahá'u'llah world And it's attracting larger and larger and larger audiences. I don't know how many there are in the room 1600 1,800 whatever number of people there are in the room It would have been 300 or 200. I can remember I was on that group of 30 30 years ago when it was about Oh, hey, we'd hit 42 And everybody says ecstatic. I mean the kingdom of heaven was just Out of beyond our almost beyond next to our reach and look at the way that this is multiplying And of course institutions of higher learning will follow And the second day I've mentioned the impressive success of our community in deflecting and organized attempt to impose on its intellectual life The same kind of elitist control that characterized religions past obviously that I mean the The ahri mons I don't know much about ahri mons, but I guess they're pretty bad spirits and they're lurking there in the shadows waiting Waiting to hurl themselves on us again So there we've heard we have not heard the last word from them nor will our children nor will our grandchildren They'll be finding new devices to pursue the same The same goals because the goal is to reassert elitist control the goal is Obviously they're going to call themselves a clergy in fact the islamic clergy didn't call themselves clergy in the beginning They said no, no, no, we're not priests. We don't have any sacrodotal functions. We are ulama We are the learned Well, you know where that went with the turbans and the nightgowns and so on and Bank accounts in switzerland. Well the same that that is um Sort of a bad gene that we've got We people have this bad gene and we have to comb it out of our Lies and hearts gradually it'll take it didn't get here in a generation It will take generations to have it combed out So the guardian warns us that covenant breaking and attacks on the faith from in and without We'll continue and that's as it should be because it strengthens us Abdu'l-ha said it's like the winds that make the roots of a tree solid As in any event We have successfully Was stood quite a major test I don't say it's anything like what lies ahead But nevertheless for where we were This was a fairly severe one because it always can bring the credit or the authority of money or position or so on to bear and this has to Be dissipated gradually But more important than obviously the association is more important than this Even this defense of the faith has been the emergence of a worldwide program of learning That is putting in place the first stones of the universal education system That will realize Bahá'u'lláh's vision that Bahá'u'lláh intends For his community and we are seeing that today and these stones are being laid down all over the world Finally, I think that the experience of these Past decades underlines a consideration of crucial importance To me a distressing and and really embarrassing feature much of contemporary exchange among Bahá'u'lláh scholars in our part of the world is the fact that they are Almost unblinkingly submitted to a culturally conditioned authority instead of concerns that is purely western in origin and alas, I'm afraid To some extent some Bahá'u'lláh scholars are inclined the same thing the talisman episode for me illustrates What is at stake in this situation? Although I can't claim to have read Extensibly the internet exchange is involved because it was masses and masses of stuff But some expert excerpts were shared with me and it was Very revealing striking to realize that the horizons of the Maginan group Had at no point extended beyond The boundaries of the United States At no point had this discussion extended beyond the boundaries of this one national context I asked because I first something came to me when I Realized began to realize that and I asked research assistant who knew all of computers and so on To do a search for me and she pointed out to me once she finished was it in the flood of Maginan postings that expatiated Exhaustibly on some subjects as all of us in quotations liberalism democracy justice reform and enlightenment What was conspicuously absent Was the mass of humankind They simply figured Not at all even tangentially In the reflections of a group of people who professed a consuming interest in a body of Scripture that revolves around the principle that the earth is one country and mankind it's citizens It is it was simply breathtaking that That this that people could be so self-deluded even the Islamic themes that were endlessly rehearsed and and repealed to in various highly arcane discussions appear and retrospective in perspective as little more than buttresses and garnishment for a blindly liberal and relativist um ideological and political agenda um Now i'm prepared well I'm prepared to believe in the possibility that shea theology may have some modest contribution to make To the challenge of creating a global civilization I'm prepared to suspend disbelief i'm sure and it'll be appropriately footnoted when that when if that actually happens But no rational person living in the opening decades of the 21st century can have any doubt Of the magnitude of the learning that will be brought to this immense collective enterprise By masses of people in other parts of the world Who um Who achieved their insights Along with learning along with study along with Who's achieved their insights through very great suffering? Very great privation and very great struggle. I think for example the people of china The people who have thrown off the dead weight of centuries of the past People who today are the very forefront of the technological and scientific and economic Revolution that is transforming the whole planet People who probably if we ask them also have Considerably experienced to share and dealing with ideological agendas whether clandestine Or quite overt with red banners and so on well now That is the real world When albu waha was here in this country when he was in green anchor. He spoke about reality. He urged us examine reality He said this is an arena for struggle for sacrifice This is not a place for play at past times those who want that struggle come come come As bahá'u'llah had said before the others leave us alone. Don't trouble us That is the real world and that is the world that the bahá'u'llah community Understands and is serving very effectively in the only way that we can because um We didn't get in the condition that we're in overnight We got in the condition that we're in over centuries and we'll take a long period of time For humanity to emerge from this darkness, but the process has begun It has moved relentlessly and of course one of the extraordinary things about the bahá'u'llah Because we're irritating to its opponents is the fact that we proceed to announce Exactly what we're planning to do Five years ahead of time or nine years ahead of time and then go ahead and do it No, nobody else in most conspicuously. I guess I should say the soviet union ever Managed that And that I suggest to you Is all the assurance that we need About the health of the life of the mind in the bahá'u'llah community