 We got this level, all right? Oh, hell, just a minute. Helen? I'm doing about using lecture right now. Oh, okay. It's my wife, and she said to tell everyone to turn their cell phones off. Okay, thank you. She actually said that if anyone has them on to use my laser and put out their eyes, but I don't think I should go that far. I'm going to start off kind of slow and easy, reading a few pages, and then we'll get real. I first want to thank the association needless to say for this honor. And I want to especially thank my brother, William Hatcher, for introducing me to the faith, or the faith to me, and for assisting me through the years in many, many ways, particularly this book about which I'm going to speak tonight. The work I'm going to talk about tonight ultimately stems from an ABS conference 30 years ago, or at least from a paper I began to write 30 years ago. And so it's only appropriate that the final, I hope, volume in that series of three volumes, Physical Reality, The Ark of Ascent, and Close Connections is presented here tonight. When in Tennyson's poem, the figure of Ulysses is about, he's come home from the Trojan War and he has realized that he's not a good ruler. He's a good adventurer. He's a terrible ruler. And so he brings the people of Ithaca together and he has his son beside him. And he says to the people, I leave the island in the hands of my son, Ptolemycus, who is a fit person to rule. He says, he has his work, I have mine. Well, I think as Baha'is we all too often have to remind ourselves that everybody can do something, but not everybody can do everything. And so we have to choose where we serve according to the needs of the faith and according to our special capacities with which we have been endowed. So if my work has had any service, it has redoubled the joy that it brings me by the love and joy I've had in actually going into the writing systematically because what you'll find if you read any of my work on the faith is that all I do is hook together passages from the writings. That's all I do. So if you disagree with anything you're going to hear tonight and there are a lot of things you're going to hear that you haven't heard before, some of you, go to the writings. That may be wrong. Or you can buy the book and see where the source is. And if you don't like the book, then you can dip it in acrylic and give it away as a yummy hot gift. It's a beautiful cover. Well, I was going to read a couple of pages, but I'm already tired of being unspontaneous. So let me simply begin this way. We're talking this weekend about the attempt to discover how the study of science or the study by scientists of reality and the study of reality by religion and philosophy can somehow coalesce and be seen as complementary studies of one single reality. Now, as Baha'is, we have an incredible advantage as Baha'i scholars if we are daring enough because we have been given strategic answers to strategic questions. And while the whole world knows the questions, when did human life begin? Does the consciousness reside in the brain or is it non-local? Is there a metaphysical reality? What impels human history? Did we evolve from some other species? Thing after thing, what is the smallest particulate matter of creation? What's the largest expression? Is the Big Bang it? Did time begin as Hawking says with the Big Bang so on? So we know the questions that humanity needs to answer to deal with strategic questions, not just about academic issues, but real everyday matters, such as the issue of when do we decide a human life is viable and so on. I've decided it's approximately age 16 if you can repeat, do you want fries with that? And can somehow subsist on a minimum wage, which is, of course, impossible. But anyway, so maybe 21 would be the viability of the fetus. Well, the point is this. I'm going to read two quotes for you before I get to passages that will be on the screen so you can read them for yourself that are very dear to me and so far is going from the strategic question to strategic answers, making a bridge. Abba Baha in one case when he's given the strategic answer and answered questions says, the answer is short by close reflection it shall be made long. Meaning I've given you the answer and I figure out how I got there. Probably the most revealing passage and so far is this whole issue of what we as Baha'is attempting to be academics and scholars, how we can serve without becoming mindless or dogmatic, which serves nobody, is a statement by The Guardian, which is the following. There is an answer in the teachings for everything. Unfortunately, the majority of the Baha'is, however intensely devoted and sincere they may be, lack for the most part the necessary scholarship and wisdom to reply to and refute the claims and attacks of people with some education and standing. So that means that even if we know the right answers and we know the right questions unless we're capable of getting from one to the other with strategic bridges, we're not serving anyone. The question that I began thinking about 30 years ago was why the creator thought that physical reality was a good way to train essentially spiritual beings so that we wake up into a world where we think we're physical and we're not. Where we think we own stuff and we don't. And we're constantly worried about dying when we're already in the spiritual realm and don't know it. And so in 1977, the first published effort of mine to reflect on this is called the Metaphorical Nature of Physical Reality which was published by ABS and which essentially says physical reality is a means by which we can incrementally come to understand abstract concepts as they are expressed by the fact that everything in creation emanates from God and as Bahá'u'lláh says everything in creation reflects attributes of God to the extent that it is capable of doing so and without that capacity it wouldn't exist. So in effect, as this concludes physical reality is a classroom of carefully, cleverly designed classroom. And the main thing I began thinking about what started me with this in part was what's the hardest thing I can think of to ask God because as Shoghi Effendi is correct and the answer to any question you can answer is in the writings or any question you can ask the answer is in the writings then I wanted to think of what was the hardest thing I could ask. And I came up with this why physical reality? Why not some other way? Well, the next publication was ten years later The Purpose of Physical Reality Many of you are familiar with that that's probably my best seller so far Well, and it's coming out again and it's going to look not like that, that's something else It's going to look like that in the fall when it comes up for trade publications rewritten so that it's not for a Bahá'í audience But the purpose of physical reality adds to this concept of physical reality as metaphorical or dramatic where we're really just acting out you know, we're acting out like this is really us when it's just a vehicle through which we operate and we're acting like the things we do are really important when they're just exercises, you know One of the interesting things that I think comes out of that work is the very end of it where, oh, I've got to go to the previous slide, don't I? Now, go to the previous slide there This is a chart that shows the progress of the soul and intellect versus the progress of the body Now, if you'll think if you'll think of of these lot timelines as sort of elastic fascia tying the body trying to pull the soul down but it's being ripped away This is God's divine plan called aging and it's an incredibly important teaching device when you think of it it means you may want to be physical and you may want to stay young but God has developed a device which will totally prohibit that successful effort or that effort from being successful You'll see I've got the dandelion effect which is really supposed to come up like that but I hit it too soon and what the dandelion effect is Walt Whitman said that he wanted to be a leaf of grass he wasn't very ambitious as a spiritual person and he he said when he dies his remains will dissociate and he will become decomposed and he will become a leaf of grass and he decided I'm going to be a dandelion so that's why I call it the dandelion effect now I hope the rest of me is doing better than that but I didn't so the next thing I did was in 1994 oh here let's do that right the 1994 the Ark of the Scent the central premise of that is simply this given now we have a classroom and we have a process for the classroom which is aging and preparing ourselves for an easy transition to the next world and while I says that's the sole purpose of this life so that transition is smooth and almost imperceptible this says individual spiritual preparation is impossible by yourself that we are essentially social beings and that individual development is impossible without working out these well you've got understanding and action these twin pullers to know and to do neither is acceptable without the other but the doing has to involve other people so you can have a hermit living in cave who thinks he's extremely spiritual and maybe everyone else thinks he's extremely spiritual but how do we know until he comes out and does something spiritual well serve on an LSA well the third book is coming up right now and that's 10 years later and that's this one that's for sale in the bookstore as I say beautiful cover it really is nice and the purpose of this is to discuss this bridge that I began with and what is it has essentially at its at the heart of the thesis is if God is essentially spiritual as creator and is running the whole physical universe then perhaps there's a comparable way in which our soul which is essentially spiritual is running our body and so I study the process enlarge the same way Plato does in the republic where he wants to define justice in the individual he wants to find it in the state where it's easily visible and so I begin by in the first part of the book discerning what we can know about how the creator runs physical creation and then I compare it to how this works on the individual level and so my talk the unveiling of the Uri of Love or Hurri of Love H is pronounced I'm a love sorry I forgot it's the white ones the pure ones the Hurris are the things that the creatures the unveiled beautiful creatures that these young men who blow themselves up expect to encounter in the next world though they won't have the appendages necessary to enjoy them I suspect but Bahá'u'lláh describes a Hurri in very specific and unambiguous terms a Hurri says Bahá'u'lláh is intervening how many Hurris of intervening that are as yet concealed within the chambers of divine wisdom none hath yet approached them Hurris whom no man nor spirit hath touched before so these young men are going to be surprised when in the next world they're handed the Qatabi Ghan which explicates all the upstreams verses of the Quran and the Hurris will be unveiled for them so that's what it is it's you know in the Bahá'u'lláh faith we don't worship mysteries we solve them we were asked to solve them not adore them and so the purpose of unveiling a Hurri is to discover the inner meaning thereof so what's the inner meaning of love well we begin with a very simple premise as enunciated and articulated in the hadith of the hidden treasure an ancient tradition in the Islamic tradition which is spoken of a great deal by both Abdu'l-Bahá and Bahá'u'lláh we could spend hours going over this tradition suffice it to say it states in the voice of the creator I wanted to be known so I brought creation into being that I might be known now from that simple statement you can deduce everything we know in the Bahá'u'lláh writings but Bahá'u'lláh helps us by spelling out in some hidden words a little more about this way in which the creator wants to be known which necessarily involves a process of being known because involved in these hidden words is love he doesn't want to be known only but love well of course the knowing will induce the love so one follows the other O son of man veiled in my immemorial being and in the ancient eternity of my essence I knew my love for thee therefore I have created thee and engraved on thee my image and revealed to thee my beauty now my image as the writings explains means our capacity to think abstractly understand attributes and to acquire attributes by acting them out and the will to pursue this endeavor so we add one little ingredient to the hidden treasure the creator doesn't just want to be known the creator wants to be love now love interestingly like education and many other important acts cannot be accomplished by coercion they must involve free will on the person you're trying to educate you can get people to act as if they have understood and acquired information to parrot information back to you but that's not education that's rehearsing someone else's education same thing with love you can get people to act in all kinds of humiliating ways to demonstrate their love for you there's nothing you can do to coerce real sincere authentic affection now love Abdu'l-Bahá says in one of these wonderful passages is the cause of God's revelation unto man so here we get a little further into the hidden treasure though it's really just reiterating the hidden treasure I wanted to be known so I brought creation into being I wanted to be known and loved so I brought creation and love is in effect the reason for creation and it is also a law of creation now we're used to it as Abdu'l-Bahá says here is the vital bond that draws things of physical reality together so things are attracted according to their mass and proximity spiritual things are attracted according to their proximity and their capacity to manifest the attributes of God the more attributes and the more complexly they're manifested the more attraction you've got so we see an exact parallel between physical and metaphysical reality now getting back to our initial problem of conjoining physical science and spiritual understanding we have then certain theses which I derive largely from a statement in my brother's book minimalism where he observes something to the following effect science possesses or thinks it possesses very exact knowledge about very discreet portions of reality which thus studies as a modular system modular meaning a system that is stuck together each piece autonomous and they somehow are stuck together and they work together whereas philosophy and religion possess or think they possess very exact knowledge about the entirety of reality which they study as a holographic system that is the whole thing is one idea which the creator has created so that it is one coordinated and integrated whole stated even more succinctly science offers a bottom of view of reality while philosophy and religion offer a top down view and of course the idea is how do we get these complimentary ingredients to realize they're really looking at the same reality where we're going to see in a minute my objective in this talk and in this book is to offer a synthesized or integrated view of these ostensibly opposing but potentially complimentary approaches to reality now what you see before you this very interesting example of the problem of this antithesis between science and religion's approach to the same reality we can always use the hackneyed analogy of the various people blindfolded or blinded in touching the various parts of the elephant think they're describing totally different things but rather than elephant this is particle science now this is a very interesting thing that happened to me where I hinted in the manuscript I went to a lecture by Frank Wilczak who works down the street at MIT he won the Nobel Prize last year for his work in quantum chromodynamics and what was interesting to me among other things was he showed a picture of a quark splitting into three parts a quark, an antiquark, and a gluon these guys are real poets but suffice it to say I had to run back and call Terry Cassaday and say hold the presses that just split a quark because I had quoted another Nobel Prize winner from nine years ago who said probably never split a quark well I should have known better but suffice it to say then this picture which he was nice enough to send to me via e-mail taken at the CERN laboratory of two particles being exploded, crashed together and there you see the results and it's beautiful and he said in his lecture that this might possibly be an interesting example of what the big buying looked like at its inception now it was interesting in two ways one because Abdu'l-Bahá says every particular system or minor system or small system emulates and imitates the functioning of every large system as Abdu'l-Bahá says like an atom can be a model of the solar system and so on so here you have particle physics showing a relationship to celestial study but that's not the interesting thing the interesting thing is that in the questions that followed I said I'm sorry to ask anything because I'm an English major but if it took all this engineering and planning and power to cause these particles to come together how come the big buying could happen without a similar cause how can you have an effect without an efficient cause well his response was very interesting he didn't respond to the question he gave me a story which means you know you're in trouble because you're going to be some character in the story who's ignominious in some way and so the story was about what is apparently according to my brother a very well known and famous anecdote that I've never heard before they don't talk about it in the English department but apparently there's Laplace who wrote a book called Mechanique Celestial was asked by Napoleon who perused the book why is there no mention of God and Laplace said with a I don't know but I was going to say with a smile but we don't really know he probably was very polite he said because I didn't need God to complete my hypothesis now here we see the reality of what my brother was talking about that science don't tell me about the Big Bang I don't need to know I'm splitting a quark and I did it and I got the Nobel Prize so you go worry about what preceded the Big Bang he told the same thing to a guy who asked about super string theories not my area I can split a quark now looking at this from a larger perspective we see that contemporary philosophy or what it's passing for contemporary philosophy and religion which is primarily people like Tony Robbins and Dwayne and Eckhart Tolle and Joel Osteen these people are interested in helping you find your inner power and they speak and Deepa Chopra for example even talks about proving the existence of God the problem that they don't deal with is they presume that you're only interested in feeling good and powerful right now they're not really worried about what you're going to feel like in 30 or 40 years I also don't mention the fact that the way to feel really good is to give seminars on how to feel good and make a lot of money and buy an island somewhere but at any rate the fact is that they also are neglecting the body politic as a whole it's existential and it's individual there is no collective plan for humankind so what you get is then the Tony Robbins philosophical approach of the top down view and you get Frank Wilczek who actually looks like that and very nice person he really is who can split a quark I could have used Wayne Dwyer but he's terribly bald I could have used Deepa Chopra but I actually have some respect for him so I use Tony Robbins because of his teeth he has the most incredible teeth I've ever seen now if God is all powerful we come to this question and this is in a sense a variation of the question that began this whole interest in 30 years ago if God wants to be known why isn't he if God's methodology works why aren't we spiritual he can be we know that by simply be and it is he has that power but again remember that the nature of the way he wants to be known necessitates an indirect process whereby people voluntarily come to know and then to love God why because it's beneficial to them to do so the only thing I can think of close to our understanding in a way is having children people who can't have children will do anything to have children there's something in us that loves loving creating and loving that which we create so God could do this in fact there is a passage in the Ronys which says within the treasury of our wisdom their life unrevealed and knowledge one word of which if we chose to divulge it would cause every human being to recognize the manifestation of God and to acknowledge his omniscience and would enable everyone to discover the secrets of all sciences and to attain so highest station is to find himself wholly independent of all past and future learning it could happen so why doesn't it well my line out didn't work Jeff let's try it again a little louder Jeff there we go I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember Captain Marvel but Billy Batson was a 16 year old kid in the comic books about 50, 60 years ago and all he would have to say is Shazam which was the name of this Egyptian wizard and he would go Shazam and suddenly he would become Captain Marvel so if he could do that God could utter and bring about whatever he wanted and of course that's kind of sexist so we need to go to Captain and Mary Marvel and the whole Marvel clan now what is James Dyson doing in this picture he is making a vacuum cleaner very good and it's a darn good vacuum cleaner it costs twice as much as any Hoover but it's well worth it because it has a lifetime guarantee and if it ever breaks he will come to your house and say your life is over and he will he will get a laser and shoot you well why is James Dyson in this picture because if we were suddenly produced in the condition that God wants us to be in we had realized that we were waking into a condition without any history and without the tools to get any further we would all be nice and loving and smiling and no backbiting and would all have Dyson vacuum cleaners but if it broke and he didn't shoot you you'd have to figure out how to fix it you know and you wouldn't know how so in other words if God said koon fa yaku nu and weird here we are and we don't know because we don't have any way of knowing how we got here therefore we don't know how to go from here to anyplace else so there's a value in getting there now here's an interesting thing that occurs you have a concept by fundamentalist religious groups some which believe that creation began 6000 years ago with the advent of Adam and God empowered Adam and thus began the human race now what's interesting in this is not only does it mean that creation just suddenly occurred to the creator is I know what I'm kind of bored today I think I'll create something you know if the creator has desired to be known he has always desired to be known very clearly but what's interesting is this is you have this sort of obscene alliance between fundamentalism and contemporary physicist because you have the idea of a single event that occurred 16 billion years ago alright now the big bang or the not so big bang because the fact is that how do you posit the theory that nothing preceded the big bang well it's totally untenable and illogical I realize but they believe this they really believe this I'll show you later what really happened but one of the things that we have as individuals and science has always had and that is a fear of infinity if we think there are infinite human beings on infinite planets there must be infinite manifestations of God ministering to those infinite planets well you can't read much of some answered questions without deducing that it's inescapable that conclusion there have always been human beings as Abdu'l-Boham because that's the fruit of creation and the creator without a creation is impossible that makes us nervous it makes us nervous when we go to a football game and think that God cares for all of these hundred thousand people as much as he does for me and we really on some level we accept that but we really don't we really think somehow that whole stadium is focused on us but what we don't realize is there are a bunch of other people thinking the same thing and they're excluding you from their universe so what we need to do is embrace infinity and it's hard to do and I don't have a short answer for you right now but suffice it to say that as Baha'is spiritual beings operating temporarily in this gestational period of our physical development and preparation for a more expansive experience in the world to come we better get used to the idea and find some way that it is not only acceptable but wonderful well we get to the nature of love which is the heart of our discussion but before we can discuss love as the process by which we come to know the creator namely the bridge that we're talking about between the creator and us we need to look at first of all this quote that love is the most great law and again the statement of love as the principle by which all physics and all human relationships work we have to notice where we are before we can get there and where we are is in a society that thanks love is an event beyond your willful control and so if someone falls in love it's not their fault even if they're already married to someone else or you know I'm sorry honey I fell in love and so I'll see you I'll keep in touch with the kids it's alright dear you couldn't help it you fell in love and you fell out of love with me well I like to call this the idea of waiting to be hit by the escalate of love it's like a traffic accident you know you don't want it to happen and so on but it's not your fault it was an accident it happened I fell in love and so it's actually pronounced escalade I know you stand there in the middle of the highway you know waiting to be hit and have that nice Cadillac imprint on your forehead you know God forbid it should be a Hyundai or something and so you fall helplessly in love but of course as I said if you can fall in love beyond your free will you fall out of love in the same way and so the escalate of love drives off and leaves you standing there and so you wait there until there's a new improved escalate of love this one is I think night blue I think it matches her dress I'm going to read you a passage about our contemporary neurotic views of love from a book by Denis Derichement called Love in the Western World it's a wonderful book it's written in the 40s actually but it discusses the fact that it is his theory that falling in love is a myth derived from the medieval metrical romance and the concept of courtly love and the fact that love is only love when you can't have it that obstacle is essential to maintaining this ecstatic passion very much like the description of the Sufi poets of the love of the friend but you can't really attain the station of the friend or the proximity of the friend when my dear friend Coleman Barks with whom I taught at Georgia and were constantly in email exchanges when he was interviewed by Bill Moyers and Moyers was asking him about Rumi and about this concept of ecstatic love and longing and Moyers was imminently reasonable and fine and smart said so what happens next why the ecstatic love is what do you do then is why do you try to do it again in other words the longing itself is the reason for the longing because it feels so good to feel so bad well I'm sure Coleman wouldn't mind my telling a joke about him but anyway the myth of falling in love operates wherever passion is dreamed of as an ideal being feared like a malignant fever imagined as a magnificent and desirable disaster instead of simply a disaster it lives upon the lives of people who think that love is their fate and is unavoidable as the effect of the love potion in the romance that it swoops upon powerless and ravaged men and women in order to consume them in a pure flame or that it is stronger and more real than happiness, society or morality and accurate analysis I think obstacle is everything without the obstacle there's no love because once you get together what are you going to describe her picking up his socks you know are cleaning the car you know all love stories in when they finally overcome the obstacle and get together if you're going by paradigm number one happy love you know sleeping beauty Cinderella so on the obstacles are overcome they get together and they live happily ever after and if they don't we don't want to hear about it well it just can't get any better than this so let's end the story but you have a second syndrome or paradigm which I call the Seindrel syndrome which is that because it feels so good and it's a genre of new love you want to do it again when it wears off and so you do it again and again and again until finally you get tired of it and you get jaded and you start taking drugs or something that's more interesting well the third paradigm is the tragic ending and these we really love I don't know I'm not crazy about them myself but the classic version of course is Romeo and Juliet now if you divide Romeo and Juliet up into the essential ingredients you first of all have love at first sight which is essential in courtly love tradition did my heart love till now for swear at sight for I never saw true beauty till this night that's what Romeo says when he goes to the ball to prove to Benvolio love at Rosalind is more fair than any of the other ladies there until he sees Juliet across the room and says forget Rosalind I love her you know she's really hot well it's the same thing you see going on out in the halls and and I don't blame him a bit but the idea that he can assess her attributes by looking is that you know I wish that he would come up to her and she would smile and not have her teeth or something and say hi what's your sign you know but she turns out to be very witty and they engage in a battle of wits where they have puns and all this stuff but it turns out that he is Romeo and you and bemoaning as she sticks her head out her window of her balcony and says why do you have to be Romeo why can't you be something else or Rose by any other name would smell as sweet well there's your obstacle here's your rendezvous people think that courtly love is non-sexual it's platonic no I'm afraid that's wrong it's entirely focused on the next time they get together so here they've spent the night together parents will tell you what that means later later ah and she is so in love that she doesn't want him to go and so you have what's called the Abad which is the morning song and they hear the lark of mourning heralding the day and she says no it's not the lark it's the nightingale well he knows if he gets caught he's going to get killed he says it's not the nightingale it's the lark and he goes now the problem is of course the plot thickens she is thought to be dead the messenger gets trapped doesn't get to Romeo he goes to the tomb to mourn the loss of his beloved Juliet he thinks he really is he takes poison and he dies and she wakes up sees he's dead sticks a dagger in her chest and she's dead and so you have the end of the play now according according to Abba Baha none of these paradigms which are really events they're not really process scenes they're not really relationships none of these is authentic love and I'm not going to read this quote because you're all familiar with it I know but he says in two passages in his discussion of love and some answered questions that this kind of thing we call love does exist it's simply not love not by itself today you will see two souls apparently in close friendship tomorrow this may be changed yesterday they were ready to die for one another today they shun one another's society this isn't love it is the yielding of the hearts to the accidents of life now what we need to realize then as Baha discusses in seven valleys and elsewhere is that love is a process and this is where we go back to our thesis I wish to be known therefore I bought creation into being that I might be known but but known in a particular way again remember you can't coerce someone to learn something you can't coerce someone to love you what you can do is provide opportunity so you need time and you need stages of development or progress that's the ladder of love it's from Plato's symposium we go back down we can imagine that these are equivalent to the seven valleys of Baha'u'llah where you search for the beloved you catch a scent of the friend or the beloved in the mystical tradition and so you have this blinding attraction this affection this infatuation and then you want to know if you have any sense what it is you're attracted to because if you're not in the condition of health you could be attracted to someone who's not good for you just as if you're in training as an athlete you will be automatically attracted to for you but if you're unhealthy you'll be attracted to precisely what's bad for you that's why Baha'u'llah has the law of parental consent because sometimes we can tell when you're not healthy and we know that you're making a bad choice but you don't see it but if you have any sense you'll extricate yourself from the claws of the eagle of love long enough to assess what it is you're attracted to to see if it's worthy healthy and then you'll proceed through the other stages are in Christian and Islamic mysticism you also have the same kind of ascending stages that are described by any number of mystics in the medieval period and other periods as well of ever more intensive experience of dearness to the divine usually that have an index of some physical experience I've listed these Jesus just arbitrary that I listed but you begin say with the search for the beloved you feel attracted to the beloved you found the scent of the beloved to use Sufi terms you study the beloved to see what it is you're attracted to you achieve some state of understanding of the beloved and why you're attracted or in the case of a person what qualities of that person remind you of the beloved and you then attain a sense of something more important than intellectual comprehension of that attraction but a sense of I've I've satisfied my intellectual curiosity and you feel a union with that again you compare this very importantly with your progress in the faith as you go through the various stages of love for yourself love the characteristics of the beloved and others then love the others for themselves union with others love the ultimate source of all attributes and then ultimately as it's variably described in the hidden were I mean in the seven valleys and other mystical writings the state of final our total selflessness true poverty and absolute nothingness which is really a fulfillment of self now how are we doing so far well our planet according to most geophysicist is 5.9 billion years old and according to the writings we are in the midst of reaching maturation so we did the geophysical part we did the rocks we got nice rocks we've got to diamonds and all kinds of really pretty rubies and things plants exotic plants animals we're not doing real well with we're losing a lot of them but the ones we've got are very nice I particularly like the cows human physical evolution we did that, been there, done that intellectual evolution we're very smart Einstein proved that and unfortunately he was later disproven but by even more smart people and we have human spiritual evolution which is in progress so we're waiting for the lesser peace we're hoping that at least I'm hoping I'll be able to see it I've been waiting for it since the Cuban missile crisis which I thought I thought would do it for sure didn't didn't do it well let's analyze these stages on a collective level attraction Baha'u'llah and Abla Baha state that inherent in our creation is the love of reality we are inherently attracted to stuff why? because very simply all stuff reflects the attributes of God that's why we're attracted to it so sometimes that attraction is perverted or distorted so on but that's what attracts us to anything that attracts us ultimately because it's inherent look at the look at the computer let me go to the previous one here last sentence that has created or deposited this love of reality in man we love reality inherently in other words it's not a choice we have we're created that way and we love it as I said because everything reminds us of that from which we emanated as a breath of spirit from God stage 2 understanding our knowledge notice the claws of the eagle of love love in the sense that Derish Moll having it does exist you do get struck down by it these attractions occur they're not imagined but what you do with them then well if it's a healthy love you investigate it and by escaping from the claws of the eagle of love that doesn't make love sound like a really sweet nice thing does it? well it requires free will to do that it's not just going to happen this is why the law of chastity is so important you know once you're enmeshed in a physical relationship you can't step back and say well let me see what objectively I feel about this you're going to be very objective so free will is very important and to illustrate this I chose a poem by John Dunn called batter my heart and it's an interesting poem because the speaker which is not really John Dunn it's a very smart guy it's a very ironic poem and he's saying God I try, I try I love you, I really do but I am so ensnared by attraction to things antithetical to you I can't seem to exert enough free will so batter my heart he compares himself to a walled city batter my heart three person God for you is yet but knock, breathe, shine seek the men that I may rise and stand or throw me and bend your force to break, blow, burn and make me new I like a usurped town to another do labor to admit you but oh to no end reason your viceroy in me me should defend but it's captive and proves weaker and true so you have these images of great power batter my heart or throw me or burn, make me new divorce me imprison me ravish me great irony there, I will be chaste if you ravish me so he's in effect asking God to take over his own duty John Dunn would be pleased it's her applause one of the more intriguing books I came across in my research in doing this book which includes discussions of particle physics astrophysics, evolution all kinds of other proofs and problems and so on is a book called the illusion free will it was published last year by a professor at Harvard but by MIT Press which would tell you something right there but what's interesting is what Wegener says is that and if any of you are students of his I'm sorry but it's not a very good book he says that that as a particle physicist he can hardly accept the existence of metaphysical reality let alone metaphysical reality having an influence on physical reality because then when Wilczek is splitting a quark he'd have to say I sure hope the people at the Deeper Chopra seminar aren't praying for this because it could affect the outcome how would you know as a physicist if metaphysical influences can affect physical events how would you know that your results are correct so what he says is we can't possibly have will I mean in the sense of a metaphysical force that actually does stuff because it would have to be a metaphysical force and it would have to exert its influence on physical reality so what he says is we have an authorship emotion it's a post-hoc event or emotion that occurs when we you know I sure felt like I did that but it was just I felt that emotion that I did it right after that thing moved and I had the sensation of doing it but I didn't cause it so what I realized is that Wick Wagner could not possibly have written the book because he would have had to well let's put it this way what I came up with was the Wagner profitability investment strategy whereby if we all gather tomorrow and go down to MIT Press we can claim our fair share of the royalties from the book because we have the emotion that we wrote the book I'm going to donate my portion to a chair not a chair, a professorial chair but a rocking chair for postmodernist theorist in their old postmodern modernist home where they rock on the front ports because they have deconstructed themselves and don't think they exist anymore and one of them will stand up and say I rock, therefore I am well Bahá'u'lláh says that we not only have free will, we not only have a classroom that is full of opportunities but we are accountable for this, each of us for recognizing what it is that we're supposed to do namely to know and to love God now how can that be well we're missing one ingredient and that is you can have the capacity to do this and to understand this you can be in a classroom replete with evidence of creator and design but you still need someone more intelligent than you are to prime you, to get you started and this of course is true in any traditional classroom situation it's true for humanity as a whole and so we have the process for bringing about guidance in our love of God and the problem is the gap I know that's blue denim but I don't mean the store here the problem is that we need a means by which the Holy Spirit can traverse that gap between metaphysical reality and us in physical reality and the way in which that is done is the process between the command could be and it is you remember when Abba Baha was placing the cornerstone at the temple in Will Matt he said the temple is already built which meant he could see the end in the beginning and he knew that in effect there was sufficient will and determination that he knew that in effect that was done well in one sense we're talking about but then we had 40 years of building it to put it in effect we were talking about what happens in between so we begin with the divine will or wish to be known going back to the hidden treasure again we have the creation of an ever advancing civilization not people in one static place with their dice and vacuum cleaners but in process that civilization is not a certain point of attainment it is being in motion in forward motion so anywhere you go from where you are that's forward to the salvation and so you need a way of getting that power to civilization and of course the way you do that is with the intermediary of translating that into that as I said thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven so you have this top down view of how do we make this earth resemble the heavenly realm in its attributes and you do that with the intermediary and of course the intermediary is a means by which the Holy Spirit is transmuted and translated into terms we can understand and so you need a human form with whom we can converse and just suddenly a blast of some sort occurred and so on we couldn't intuit this information and so in crucial times you need two of these and if you squint your eyes you'll see that that's what Abdu'l-Bahá did when he designed the ring symbol he shows a top down view of replicating perfection perfection-Bahá as it is in heaven on earth by means of the intermediary of the Holy Spirit descending through the manifestation however and this is very important this is something you might not have thought of before that's a subordinate relationship and it's verified by this quote that you're all familiar with know thou that the kingdom is the real world and this nether place is only its shadow stretching out a shadow hath no life of its own existence is only a fantasy and nothing more it is but images reflected in water and seeming as pictures to the eye so this dust heap this is nothing this world and so on so you have that but then you have the antithesis of it and that is if you notice in the corners of the shrine of the Bob the symbol is arranged that it's not so much one above the other but you have them corresponding to each other now listen carefully because this gets interesting here's the quote that supports that view the spiritual world is like unto the phenomenal world they are the exact counterpart of each other whatever objects appear in this world of existence are the outer pictures of the world of heaven imagine that that means every single attribute or combination of attributes that can exist in spiritual reality must necessarily have an expression in physical reality which means what physical reality has to be infinite now imagine that's infinity let me go back and do it again for you here we are in the realm of the spirit it's going all the way past the screen over there it's going all the way that way for infinity and that way and that way in every other way it's infinite but if physical reality is a counterpart relationship it's got to be infinite too it's like the outer garment of the physical world the visible aspect of spiritual reality not a separate reality now if you think of the fact that we are souls we're really breaking the laws of all modern contemporary physicists theories right now by speaking soul to soul because you're willfully listening I hope and I'm willfully speaking I think in all kinds of complex things have to go through the intermediary by which this comes into speech to sound goes through these speakers sometimes and reaches your ears and so we are souls populating the spiritual world but we can't see that realm it's concealed from us so long as we have an associative relationship through the brain with physical reality we feel like we physical we feel like our thinking is right here the mind the conscious mind associates the brain but is not in the brain or of the brain any more than the soul even though it associates with the body is dependent on the body and so if you will we are still spiritual souls operating in the guise of a physical situation and so we relate to each other as best we can in this but veiled from the fact that in the twinkling of an eye that physical reality once someone hits you with an escalade of death Hyundai of death you certainly in the twinkling of an eye this whole illusion of your being physical is shattered and you are made aware there's no longer an associative relationship so here's where it gets even more interesting so pay attention again I mean not that you haven't been you're doing great three stages of assistance before incarnation during incarnation after incarnation the manifestations are assisting us before they're incarnate the prophets unlike us are pre-existent the soul of Christ existed in the spiritual before his birth in this world we cannot imagine what that world is like so words are inadequate to picture his state of being pre-existent knowledge by the one true God we read the tablet Eric was revealed why he were yet unaware and we had perfect knowledge of the book when you were yet unborn they choose where they're going to become manifest the primary reason why the bobbin Baha'u'llah chose to appear in Persia and the Persians might not want to read this it's not good we'll skip over that they choose the persona through which they will become manifest the disillusion of the tabernacle where in the soul of the manifestation of God had chosen temporarily to abide he chose not only to do this and this is my personal opinion totally personal speculation it may be one of the meanings of the suri hekel the construction of yeah of the physical vehicle through which he's about to operate I don't think that's all it means it's a very complex work but it's interesting to think about stage two during Incarnation well we don't need to spend a lot of time on that we're all familiar with that he brings new laws his own person exemplifies his own revelation but this is another important thing that many Baha'is are not keenly aware of and that is from the beginning that holy reality is conscious of the secrets of existence and from the age of childhood signs of a greatness appear and are visible in him therefore how can it be that all these bounties with these he should have no consciousness are to put it this again the person of the manifestation is one of the proofs of this station very important in other words their manifestations before they come they're aware they're going to do it they're aware when they're here of who they are one explanation of their omniscience they're omniscient since the sanctified realities the supreme manifestations of God surround the essence and qualities of the creatures transcend and contain existing realities and understand all things therefore their knowledge is divine knowledge and not acquired that is to say it is a holy bounty it is divine revelation they are undipotent at will as Baha'u'llah says son of wolf of negative that don't talk about the miracles we performed it's not the kind of proof we need to utilize or we want why? if the prophet said I am going to be my name is going to be Baha'u'llah I will appear in Tehran and the year so and so what proof of understanding would be adduced by someone discovering the prophet none so they're concealed during their lifetime they are concealed so the only ones who will find them are those who are attuned to what it is they're looking for here's another really mind-boggling thing the creativity of the prophet we're used to speaking of the prophet as the mouthpiece of God which of course in one sense he is but it is clear in the writings that the prophet plays an artistic or creative role not only in his language but in everything else he does not ours the living witness of the alls of doing potency of his faith to question for a moment and however dark the misery that enshrouds the world the ability of Baha'u'llah to forge with the hammer of his will his will and through the fire of tribulation upon the anvil of this travailing age and in the particular shape the mind has envisioned the scattered and mutually destructive fragments into which a perverse world has fallen into one single unit solid and indivisible able to execute his design for the children of man so you see that the guardian says the manifestation is not just someone who suddenly transformed and struck by the revelation and just opens a mouth he works at this he works at this why? he's not an ordinary human being they are not transformed into manifestations this is critical friends that you understand this because if not you will run into or could very well run into the same dilemma that Christians did when they made Christ God you don't want to make the manifestations human they aren't not ordinary human beings for a time they work through a human vehicle briefly the holy manifestations have ever been and ever will be luminous realities no change or variation takes place in their essence before declaring their mission they excuse me before declaring their mission they are silent and quiet like a sleeper and after their manifestation they speak and are illumined like one who is awake and so the function of this guidance then through the manifestations is sometimes compared to a mirror a perfect mirror through which the attributes of God can be made manifest to us but I have heard sometimes used the analogy that we who are finite cannot stand to behold the infinite and therefore we can't look up at God because he's too brilliant and bright and mind-boggling but we can look at God through this perfect mirror well that doesn't make any sense does it because if it's a perfect mirror it's just as blinding as the source of that perfect mirror so you've got to not mix the metaphors the perfect mirror image is used but it's in Abdu'l-Bahá's discussion of the distinction between manifestation and emanation it might be better sometimes if in your teaching you use the image of the mirror to describe the fact that the most perfect image of God we get is through the manifestation but one image I found very useful is the prism metaphor and that is this Holy Spirit is made understandable to us the attributes visible to us through the manifestation now one thing interesting about this let me see how how long have I been doing this too long alright we'll go a little longer I don't want to bore you but this is exciting stuff for me let's just say what's interesting about this metaphor beside the fact that it's taking the pure white light that really is incomprehensible to us and giving it discernible attributes is that the prism is infinite and that is you have here with this red line the visible at the visible aspects of the prism going in either direction infinitely infinitely longer towards the left in this particular chart are infinitely shorter towards gamma rays and x-rays and so forth to the right which means again the manifestation infinitely and perfectly reflects all the attributes of God stage three of assistance he's helping us now well we know that we've all read these before but they take on another significance when you think of it in these stages in my presence among you there's a wisdom and in my absence there is yet another inscrutable to all but God the incomparable the old knowing rarely we behold you from our realm of glory and shall aid whosoever will arise for the triumph of our cause with the host of the concourse on high and a company of our favored angels another quote that's similarly astounding now this is a longer version of a quote I gave you earlier where the guardian talks about the fact that once released from this associated relationship with the figure that he chose to work through the power of the whole lot was unleashed and could well let me just read it the disillusion of the tappernacle where in the soul of God had chosen temporarily to abide signalized its release from the restrictions which an earthly life out of necessity imposed upon it its influence no longer circumscribed by any physical limitations its radiance no longer be clouded by its human temple that soul could henceforth energize the whole world to agree unapproached at any stage in the course of its existence on this planet that's important to know well this I'll skip over a bit but this is something you all know because it's discussed fully in the Egon namely that the closest we get to attaining the presence of God is attaining the proximity to the manifestation which itself is not physical proximity but spiritual proximity but here's a part of it you may not have noticed this persists in the next world I remember I gave a talk and I was talking about this and one Bahá'í friends said but it says we'll attain the presence of God in a form that befits what we've attained and another Bahá'í said how can there be presence there's no physical reality so what does it mean what's interesting is this we will have the experience of God's spirit through his prophets in the next world but God is too great for us to know without this intermediary the prophets know God but how is more than human souls can grasp so in other words this intermediary teaching device persists even in the next world and so if we construct the causal relationships beginning with the emanation from the first mind of the wish to be known we get this from the unknown essence of God emanates the primal wish or will of God by means of the Holy Spirit that conveys this wish to the pre-existent manifestation who determines to assume the guise of a human persona that he might exemplify godliness in his person and actions and provide laws and guidance for our creative action so we can progress in our love relationship with God now I'm going to take just a few minutes and go through this quickly so that you can relax and so on I'll be somewhere if you have questions I don't know Mehran what did we decide about that well we'll figure that out later now we've done the collectivity of humankind the intermediary relationship let's quickly look at the personal relationship three stages of the conscious self prenatal when we're in physical association relationship post-associational clarity we're in the world of vision stage one before incarnation that's a baby smiling in the womb why is it smiling well because it doesn't have to go all the stuff we go through every day I guess I don't know but suffice it to say and I have to say Farid that your dear wife Faranak at the course of Lou Helen said I think the baby has free will in the womb and I thought I've never thought of that I don't remember my free will in the womb I know my son did a complete knot in his uterus in the umbilicus the doctor after delivered James said you want this like it was an umbilical cord with a true knot in it, not a kink but a knot I thought what is these, sick or something you know for one thing that caused us to have to have about two stress tests to be sure he was getting enough blood because he tied a knot in his umbilicus so I wasn't pleased at all well at any rate we come up with this question again, these crucial questions for which we have to as Bahá'í scholars construct bridges to the answers we know the answer we know the answer but unless we can convince others by constructing logical arguments what good are we the brain three pounds of electrified meat are the repository of the conscious mind it's an incredibly complex it is the most complex thing in creation and in my book I go into a great deal of detail about brain theory and how the brain acts as the intermediary between our soul and our body and so you get the brain made of 150 billions of these I don't know why they got there why is this here, hold on one second oh ok so we can construct a similar paradigm of a top down view we have the soul we have the intermediary of the rational faculty which emanates from the soul and which during its associational relationship with the brain or through the brain to the body is relating to the body through the brain but it's not dependent on the brain I understand as soon as the brain is rendered inadequate to become a functioning intermediary the conscious mind is free to be in the world of vision but it's still conscious and so if you have transparency as you did with the perfect mirror then what you see hello, I'm up a high is what you get hello, I'm up a high now that's if the brain is wired correctly you don't have any emotional illnesses or physical illnesses you're in good health basically that's what we aim for but it's never perfect now if you don't feel like yourself sometimes you get a distortion a distorted image of what's what's happening in your soul and so I'm up a high now this is if you get hitting the head hard or you just ate too much sugar or something now this is the delusional self where the brain is not transparent because of some chemical imbalance hello, I'm up a high I'm Johnny Ketch that's my favorite I do now what we've got here this is what I call in the book the periscopic view of reality and this is kind of the end of where we're going with this it's a simple metaphor but I think it works very well it means so long as this associational or associative relationship endures that you can affect the ability of yourself to understand yourself through some defect of the brain so not only is your ability to communicate with others encumbered but your own ability to understand yourself is encumbered but we know for a fact that the self the essential self the soul is not affected so if you think of the brain as a milk carton and you've got a homemade periscope then the soul from the soul emanates the mind the conscious self but during this associational or associative relationship it must deal with reality through that brain in the words you can't separate yourself unless you're having an out of body experience from this relationship so the conscious mind is not really aware of the soul it's only aware of itself and so it may get information indirectly inductively through the senses the information arrives in the conscious mind you retain it you decide what to do about it or you may be inspired you may receive information directly from the realm of the spirit through prayer, through reflection through meditation it's still going to end up in the same place your conscious mind so long as the brain is in associative relationship so you're still not aware of the soul so whether the information comes to you in a dream or through prayer or through study of the writings you're still in the same place your conscious mind you've still got to evaluate it and decide what you do with it so long as you're in this associative relationship as I said the same process is happening right now with you and me now finally with a healthy brain you have the powers of the soul some of which are reason, will self self-consciousness ideation memory, emotion emotion is a product of the soul it's transmitted through the chemistry of the brain and you can make somebody happy by giving them a lot of endorphins but read the book but that's a healthy brain and a healthy body the latin phrase mensana incorporesano transparency but if things get screwed up bad then all of these capacities seem to disappear someone with Alzheimer's someone with dementia someone with a physical traumatic injury they seem to disappear as personalities as people we know and so their own conscious self also disappears and you'll get this report it's sad but it's true from the holy body shop we can find absolutely nothing wrong with your soul or its powers and faculties we can only conclude your temple has been totaled sorry but as you know we are not allowed to do reincarnations and then stage three where you're released from that associative relationship and you're in the world of vision and all of these powers are now apparent again in the twinkling of an eye Bahá'u'lláh says this happens as soon as that relationship suffers that happens we had some discussion at Lou Helen when I gave a course on this a couple of weeks ago of people relating experiences oh never mind out-of-body experiences very interesting well this gives us a few additions and this is the final paradigm we go from the unknowable essence of God so on, so on so on and we add to it the intermediary of the human brain so long as the human soul is in an associative relationship with the human body the hurre of the veil between our conscious consciousness and metaphysical reality during an associative associational period of existence this is a lovely quote didst thou behold immortal sovereignty thou would strive to pass from this fleeting world but they conceal the one from thee and to reveal the other is a mystery which none but the pure in art can comprehend and of course you're all familiar of the individual who asked Bahá'u'lláh for the boon of being able to see the next world it's authenticated the story and Bahá'u'lláh said it wouldn't be good for you to do that and he insisted so Bahá'u'lláh said okay and showed him a glimpse of the next world and he immediately killed himself true story well what is immortal sovereignty alright I'm sorry this is messing up here that's immortal sovereignty if there's one big bang there's gotta be a bunch of big bangs we're looking at one big bang from inside it outside it if you've got infinite space there's not the big bangs going on right there's probably glimps of big bangs you know I've invented the glump in my book I'll be famous someday for inventing the glump and finally in addition to the view of the cosmic celestial reality from God's point of view we have the end of mortal sovereignty which is not so impressive thank you thank you