Reflections on the Baha'i Faith and a Culture of Learning

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>> Essays and poetry by Ron Price
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Abstract:
The building of the structure of this new
world Faith, a structure with many
functions, was at the core of Bahai
programs and policies, goals and game-
plans, so to speak, from 1921 to 1996, a
period of 75 years, as well as back into the
19th century.
Notes:
This book of 550 pages(font 14) and 230
thousand words contains reflections and
understandings regarding the new Baha'i
culture of learning and growth, what
amounts to a paradigmatic shift, in the
Baha‘i community. This international
community found in over 200 countries
and territories, as well as some 120
thousand localities has been going through
this shift in its culture since the mid-1990s.
The Baha'i Faith claims to be the newest,
the latest, of the Abrahamic religions. This
Faith had its origins in mid-19th century
Iran. This new culture, or paradigm, will
be developing in the decades ahead at least
until 2044, the end of the second century
of the Baha'i Era(1844 to 2044), and
perhaps beyond into that third century of
the Baha'i era, 2044 to 2144. Time will tell
when the next paradigmatic shift will take
place in the international Baha'i
community.
.

Comparisons and contrasts are made to
several previous paradigm shifts in the
Baha'i community. Thoughts on future
developments within this paradigm and
future paradigms are suggested. In the first
six years, 2007 to 2013, of the presence on
the internet of this commentary, it has
contributed to an extensive dialogue on the
issues regarding the many related and
inter-related processes involved in the
many ongoing changes in the international
Bahai community.
This work is dedicated to the Universal
House of Justice, trustee of the global
undertaking which the events of more than
a century ago set in motion. The fully
institutionalized charismatic Force, a Force
that historically found its expression in the
Person of Baha'u'llah, had effloresced by a
process of succession, of appointment and
election, at the apex of Bahai
administration for half a century by the end
of April 2013.
I have also written this book as a form of
dedication to, by some accounts, an
estimated 15 to 25 thousand Baha'is and
Babis who have given their lives for this
Cause from the 1840s to the second decade
of this third millennium. I have also
dedicated this book to the many best
teachers and exemplary believers--those
ordinary Bahais--who have consecrated
themselves, indeed their lives, to the work
of this Faith.
Finally, I have written this work in
memory of my maternal grandfather,
Alfred Cornfield, whose life from 1872 to
1958 has always been for me a model of an
engagement in a quite personal culture of

learning and personal growth.
This book is, arguably, the longest analysis
and commentary on this new Baha'i
paradigm that is currently available in the
Bahai community, although several other
books have appeared since this piece of
writing first appeared in cyberspace in
2007. The overarching perspective in this
book is a personal one that attempts to
answer the question: "where do I fit into
this new paradigm?" Readers are left to
work out their own response to this
question as readers inevitably must, now
and in the decades ahead, as this new
paradigm develops a life of its own within
the framework already established in the
first two decades of its operation: 1996 to
2016. The question now is not "if" but
"how" each Baha'i will engage themselves,
will participate, in this new paradigm as
the first century of the Formative Age
comes to an end in 2021 and in the years
beyond as this third millennium continues
to challenge all of humanity.
See also bahai-
library.com/price_pioneering_four_epochs.
Reflections on a Culture of Learning and Growth: Community and
Individual Paradigm Shifts:
A Contemporary, Historical, Futuristic and Personal Context
by Ron Price
PREAMBLE
Section 1:

This book of 550 pages(font 14) and 230 thousand words contains reflections
and understandings regarding this new Bahá'í culture of learning and growth,
what amounts to a paradigmatic shift, in the Baha‘i community which it has
been going through since the mid-1990s. This newest, this latest, of the
Abrahamic religions, has been developing a new culture in the last two
decades, from 1996 to 2016. This new culture or paradigm will be
developing in the decades ahead at least until 2044, the end of the second
century of the Bahá'í Era(1844 to 2044), and perhaps beyond into that third
century, 2044 to 2144. Time will tell when the next paradigmatic shift will
take place in the international Bahá'í community.
Comparisons and contrasts are made to several previous paradigm shifts in
the Bahá'í community. Thoughts on future developments within this
paradigm and future paradigms are suggested. In the first six years, 2007 to
2013, of the presence of this book, this commentary, on the world-wide-web,
this work has contributed to an extensive dialogue on the issues regarding
the many related and inter-related processes involved in the many ongoing
changes in the international Bahai community, a community which exists in
more than 200 countries and territories, and more than 120,000 localities,
across the planet.
Section 2:
This work is dedicated to the Universal House of Justice, trustee of the
global undertaking which the events of more than a century ago set in
motion. The fully institutionalized charismatic Force, a Force that
historically found its expression in the Person of Bahá'u'lláh, had fully
effloresced by a process of succession, of appointment and election, at the
apex of Bahai administration for half a century by the end of April 2013.

I have also written this book as a form of dedication to, by some accounts, an
estimated 15,000 to 25,000 Bahá'ís and Babis who have given their lives for
this Cause from the 1840s to the second decade of this third millennium. I
have also dedicated this book to the many best teachers and exemplary
believers--those ordinary Bahais--who have consecrated themselves, indeed
their lives, to the progress of this Faith.
Finally, I have written this work in memory of; firstly, my maternal
grandfather, Alfred Cornfield, whose life from 1872 to 1958 has always been
for me a model within my own family of an engagement in a quite personal
culture of learning and personal growth; and secondly, the many others who
have been my mentors in life, others whose learning or experience, or both,
has been an inspiration from my late teens when I began to read seriously in
the social sciences and humanities, and when I began to take part in the
community life of a religion which had come into my family's life back in
1953 when I was just nine years old.
INTRODUCTION
Part 1: The Internet
This book is, arguably, the longest analysis and commentary on this new
Bahá'í paradigm that is currently available in the Bahai community, although
several other books have appeared since this piece of writing first appeared
in cyberspace in 2007. Some of these books devoted part of their content to
this new culture of learning. The overarching perspective in this book is a
personal one that attempts to answer the question: "where do I fit into this

new paradigm?" Readers are left to work out their own response to this
question as readers inevitably must, now and in the decades ahead, as this
new paradigm develops a life of its own within the framework already
established in the first two decades of its operation: 1996 to 2016. Each
Bahá'í has to work out what form his or her ready embrace of the unfolding
guidance of the Plan will take. Each Bahá'í has to work out what form, what
attitude, what ways and means, their approach to learning and the cultural
attainments of the mind will take in this new paradigm. The question now, as
one prominent Bahá'í writer put it, is not "if" but "how" each Bahá'í will
engage themselves, will participate, in this new paradigm as the first century
of the Bahá'í Formative Age comes to an end in 2021, and its second century
unfolds in the years beyond 2021 as this third millennium continues to
challenge all of humanity in ways that can now only be dimly envisaged.
In drawing on the works of other writers over the last six years, 2007 to
2013, I should emphasize at the outset of this lengthy read that, by 2013, the
internet had a myriad print and audio-visual resources on this new paradigm.
Indeed, more than a little emphasis should be given in this book and in this
new paradigm to the internet. Since the mid-1990s when this paradigm
began its life in the Baha‘i international community as a critical means for
the growth of a distinctive Baha‘i culture of learning, the internet has
transformed communication on the planet, at least for those with access to
the world-wide-web. My book is just one of the seemingly infinite number of
resources now available for the 5 to 8 million Bahá'ís and the billions of
others on the planet who want to know more about this new world Faith, and
about its unfolding paradigm.
Advanced computational and communications technologies play a highly
varied and diverse, set of roles in today's global economic, social, cultural,
political, and even ecological orders. The new Bahá'í culture is one of the
many cultures that have been transformed due to the internet. Evidence of
this exists in technologies used to implement the internationalization, the
globalization, of this Bahá'í culture of learning and growth. The world-wide-
web lives in many of the cultural manifestations of the Bahá'í culture of
learning spread as it is now across 1000s of localities on the planet. The tools
that shape this new media and its practices have transnational impacts and
profoundly influence the global outreach of the international Bahá'í
community. The new media tools in cyberspace provide contexts for local,
regional, national and global-scale interaction. The academic study and the

practical everyday use of the world-wide-web is a truly interdisciplinary
undertaking that has no fixed academic home and, by extension, no
organized intra-disciplinary, self-regulating value system or ethics -- in other
words, it has no cohesive philosophical discourse. It is utilized by the Bahá'í
community at all levels in a virtually infinite number of ways. The internet is
imbedded in the larger societal and cultural, subjective and objective,
economic and community structures of lived experience. The systems within
which Bahá'ís exist and operate are now deeply connected to the WWW. At
the same time, through this embededness, this new digital media acts back
on the social so that its specific capabilities can engender new concepts of
the social and of the possible.
The communication and the communicating subject in cyberspace is
endowed with a great deal of autonomy... over the institutions and
organizations of communication. The paradigm shift that is the new culture
of learning has taken place at the same time as the pardigm shift in
communication that has resulted from the internet. This transformation of
communication is, in some ways, a transformation from mass
communication to mass self-communication. The autonomy of social actors
like myself has increased &, therefore, the power relationships in the Bahá'í
community as well as the larger society has altered. The nature of this altered
power relation implicit in this communication shift due to the internet has
possibly four particular sources of power. The new mass self-communication
provides for people like me: (i) with networking power which is the power to
include or exclude entities from my system of communication; (ii) with
network power which is the power to set the terms of the interactions that
take place within the system through protocols that I define; (iii) with
networked power which is the power of enabled social actors over other
social actors within the system; and finally, (iv) with network-making power
which is the power to shape a system by installing protocols that adhere to
my particular goals and values.
The programmer/maker of the work, for example, this book, in setting the
terms of the conversation, can be said to shape the limits of engagement in
relation to that work. Both myself and my readers, in turn, exert pressure on
the system, the Bahá'í community. We can strengthen the system, the Bahá'í
community by using it as the forum for communicating what I am writing.
But my book may also potentially cause a negative input into the
community. In the case of the new media, the internet, it can work with little
or no interaction. The digital media we now use are not neutral tools. They
enact social, ethical and moral worldviews as this book attempts to do. The
work I do as a writer and author is relevant. But what I write must be
sensitive to Bahá'í core values and ethics. Writers like myself need to

possess both a disciplinary sense of self-assuredness that what I am writing
is good work within the intellectual culture that is the Bahá'í international
community. My work must be underpinned by a strong ethical philosophy
that is consistent with (i) the broad framework of the Bahá'í teachings and
(ii) my covenantal relationship with the Cause.
Part 2: This Book as Centrepiece of My Literary Output
This book had become for me a sort of centerpiece, not only within all the
internet posts on the subject, but also within the context of my own writing
in these last two decades. Readers wanting to understand this new Bahá'í
culture were not and are not short on analyses and commentary if they want
to get a picture of what this new Bahá'í culture was, and is, all about. After
six years of having this book in cyberspace this book had become somewhat
irrelevant to the mass of readers who preferred short posts, and for whom a
book of this size was just too much in our 21st century world of print and
image glut. As the first months of 2013 went by, and the 50th anniversary of
the election of the Universal House of Justice in April 1963 came and went, I
found I was adding more and more to this book on a variety of topics that I
had no intention of writing about back in 2007 at the inception of this work.
There were always several occasions each year when the Universal House of
Justice sent further explanatory messages which (a) extended this new
Baha‘i culture in either or both its structure and its functioning, and which
(b) provided a continuing exegisis for the benefit of a community which was
striving to put in place the many dimensions of this new Baha‘i culture. I
was always able, therefore, to add and edit, comment and analyse this new
Bahá'í culture at least several times each year. Who knows where and when
this book will find its final edition!
Part 3:This Book As Useful Resource to the Bahá'í Community
This book had become for many a useful resource for readers wanting a
macroscopic view of the new Bahá'í paradigm. As 2013 advanced month by
month, and the current Five Year Plan, 2011 to 2016, moved through the
first months of its third year from 21/4/'13 to 21/6/'13, I continued to edit a
document that had grown to well over 500 pages. Editing is an endless task,
as most serious writers find. Time would tell, given the highly dynamic
nature of this new Bahá'í paradigm, and the extensive growth in the new
Bahá'í culture, just how large a book this piece of writing would become in

the remaining years of the current FYP, and the years taking the Bahá'í
community in 2021 to the end of the first century of its Formative Age.
What appears to be emerging from the digital revolution is the possibility of
a new mode of temporality for public communication, one in which public
exchange through the written word can occur without deferral, in a
continuously immediate present. A world in which we are all, through
electronic writing, continuously present to one another, at least to the extent
and in whatever ways we desire. There is, I would like to suggest, something
unprecedented in this possibility of the escape of writing from fixity. What
the digitalization of text seems to have opened up is the possibility for
writing to operate in a temporal mode hitherto exclusively possible for
speech, as parole rather than langue, (Hesse, 1996: 32), to use expressions
from the analysis of language and linguistics. This ‗continuously immediate
present‘ of writing allows one's writing projects, and one's conversations
around those projects, to develop in a more fruitful, more organic fashion.
Such is the case here.
There are now many ways that writing in cyberspace can be described. I
have just written a few things in the paragraph above and readers should not
concern themselves if they don't understand some of the ways, some of the
words, I have used. The internet is a new medium of communication, like the
TV and the radio, the telephone and the telegraph before it. There is now an
extensive literature on the subject of the internet and its ways and means of
communicating. Each reader will, of course, have their own experience. The
majority of the 5 to 8 million Bahá'ís will never see this book; for less than
half the world has access to the internet as of 2013. I write for a coterie, but
so do all writers. Some coteries are big ones and some are little. After some
30,000+ hits, I'd say this coterie is in the middle range; it is not likely to go
viral, and I will never be either famous or rich.
Writers like myself in this document are willing to expose some of the
process of editing online as they go about extending their work in
cyberspace, in public. This process allows some readers at least to see some
of the bumps and false starts along the way. I didn‘t at first sense, as I wrote
the first edition of this now lengthy work in cyberspace back in 2007, that I
was even embarking on a book-length project; I only knew that I had a small,

persistent series of questions that I wanted to think a little bit about. Having
formulated an initial stab at some possible answers, and having been
disagreed with, as well as supported and encouraged by those who read my
work in its first two years online(2007 to 2009), the feedback from my
commentators made me think in more complex ways about the issues I‘d
presented. Only then was I able to recognize that there was more to be said,
that there was something in the ideas to which I felt compelled to commit
myself. Without the simple and highly focused beginnings of this book back
in 2007, without those first questions and, by then, by 2007, a decade of
thinking about this new Bahá'í culture, as well as the often inadvertent
process of drafting more and more commentary in the public space that is the
internet, I would not have been led by sensible and insensible degrees to this
longer text, a text that is now more than 500 pages. The book has come
together bit by bit over the last 73 months.
Approaching my writing from the perspective of process, thinking about how
ideas move and develop from one form, one post, one piece of writing to the
next, and thinking about the ways that those stages are represented,
connected, preserved, and ‗counted‘ within new digital modes of publishing,
all helped to foster what has become, for me, a highly fertile text. I took full
advantage of the web‘s particular temporality, its sense of and use of time. A
great deal of stuff that appears, that is published, on the web exists, in some
sense, in a perpetual draft state, open to future change. Writers therefore, like
myself, recognize both the need this creates for careful preservation of the
historical record of the stages in a text‘s life and the equal importance for all
authors who utilize this cyberspace mechanism of approaching their work
openly, thinking about how their texts might continue to grow even after
they‘ve seen the light of day in some 'published' form. The internet is a new
world for both writers and readers. As a writer and teacher over many
decades, I am fully aware of how much many find the process of analysis
like a disease and with a weary sigh they often turn to other topics if the
analysis goes on too long. Indeed, there are many potentially tortuous
considerations which, as a writer, I simply ignore. One can not keep
everyone happy all of the time with what one writes. As I often say in this
book: I write for a coterie.
Part 4:This Book Has Many Authors

As this text became increasingly available for the sort of ongoing
development to which I refer above, I recognized more and more the degree
to which I was no longer the sole author working on this book. This work
became far more collaborative than any book I have written in the past. New
modes of collaboration – over time, across distances – made possible by
networked writing structures required me to think about originality quite
differently, precisely because of the ways that these new modes intervened in
my conventional associations of authorship with individuality, with this
work as mine. This was a new world of publishing and it was a new Bahá'í
culture as the fin de siecle closed and the first years of the 21st century
advanced incrementally.
The two facets of conventional authorship, individuality and originality, are
intertwined in complex and subtle ways: insisting that a text must consist of
one‘s ‗own‘ work is to insist that it make an original contribution to the field.
The bottom-line, as they say these days, is that one's work is not simply one's
own, not uniquely one's own. Not only does the operation of the digital
network exclude the possibility of uniqueness in its very function, the links
and interconnections that the network facilitates profoundly affect the shape
of any given text. In digital scholarship, the relationships between the
authors whose ideas we draw upon, and the texts that we produce is highly
dynamic. The work of our predecessors is in some sense contained within
whatever increasingly fuzzy boundaries draw the outlines of one's own texts.
And so it is that readers may find this work somewhat fuzzy and not to their
liking. It will be too long a read, as I say above, for many but, "such is life"
as the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly is reported to have said on his way to the
gallows in NSW in 1880.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Reflections on a Culture of Learning and Growth: Community and
Individual Paradigm Shifts:
A Contemporary, Historical, Futuristic and Personal Context
by Ron Price

George Town Tasmania Australia
______________________________________
PREAMBLE #2:
Section 1:
This book of 550 pages and 230 thousand words(font 14) contains reflections
and understandings regarding the new Bahai culture, what amounts to a
gradual paradigmatic shift, in the Baha‘i community. This community is now
found in over 200 nations and territories on the planet. It is the second most
widespread religion on earth. This paradigm shift has been taking place since
the mid-1990s, with its first intimations going back arguably as far as April
1988 or even the 1970s when the concept of the institute first became part of
the Bahá'í community's process of deepening its adherents. This new
paradgim will continue in its various permutations and combinations, its
wide-ranging developments at least until 2021, if not until the end of the 2nd
century of the Bahai Era in 2044. This shift will possibly find an increasing
elaboration beyond 2044 into the third century of the Bahá'í Era, 2044 to
2144, as this new world Faith plays an increasing part in the affairs of the
world and its peoples. From time to time in this book I make mention of the
paradigm shifts in our wide-wide world as it increasingly globalizes,
planetizes and becomes one world socially as it already it, to a significant
extent, technologically and scientifically. Of course, the wider paradigm
shifts that involve the entire planet are all very complex and these wider
shifts, are not the focus of this book, although they cannot be entirely
divorced by the Bahá'í community and its 5 to 8 million adherents.
This book also aims to offer, such is my hope, many pages that help its

readers evaluate who they are, or think they are, in relation to the ideal they
perceive before them, the ideal conveyed in Bahá'í texts and the ideal they
see as they view their own lives. I feel somewhat presumptuous insofar as
this aim is concerned. I am sure most readers who are Bahá'ís are already
very much aware and are more than a little able to recognize the distance that
lies between their present capacities and those toward which they strive. But
our real selves are so often hidden within us, even though we know there are
angels who can and do help us. These angles are the confirmations and the
celestial powers that come our way in this paradigm and in previous
paradigms. The God within is a somewhat complex idea: "Look within
thyself and thou wilt find Me standing within thee, Mighty, Powerful and
Self-Subsistent."
Intercession is the result of generous devotion more than logical analysis. I
trust that my desires, my efforts to gain the intercession of faithful souls over
several decades, will overcome my unmortified passions. The deepest need
in our characters is right desire and there are many prayers that express these
right desires. Right desire is very important for a writer who is trying to
convey a wide range of complex ideas. The impersonal power of the Cause,
in so many subtle ways, comes to be seen by writers and artists, indeed,
people in all walks of life, as one's personal power. The mind does not
countenance such an idea, but the ego proceeds undetected in its insidious
and evil course, underground, as it were. Each of us must come to know
themselves; it is on this basis that we come to know others. We each have to
do battle with our inner demons and dragons, our lower self; no one else can
fight that battle for us. In rejecting the sin and not the sinner, this also
includes our own dear selves. And, to conclude some of this aphoristic
advice let me say that, so often the cup must become empty before it is filled
again. I think this is as true for ourselves as it is for others who first come to
this new Faith and study it for the first time, or even for those who study it
for years. Everyone fills their lives with all sorts of stuff, and it so often is
this "stuff" that keeps the cup full and the person never really enters the
garden of the Cause. He or she stands at the gate and looks within, but never
enters. This is true for more reasons that we are aware.
I hope that I will not be hindered from that which has been ordained for me,
hindered by wayward appetites, appetites which cause the profoundest
trouble in my character.(Gleanings, p.315) I also hope the same for my
readers. And who knows what is ordained for each of us as we travel the

path. May God help my readers, as I pray that He helps me, to disentangle
each of us from evil, from great human passions, and to deliver us from evil
because so often we are not strong enough to do it on our own. In this new
paradigm Bahá'ís have to deal with so many forces in the world of existence-
-but they matter not at all, if we only realized it, and realizing this is no easy
task. At least it is no easy task for me. What matters is our own dear lives.
They are of the greatest importance.(Paris Talks, p.118) Our outward
conflicts are but an echo of a more inward war. It is a war that is fought with
prayer, prayer which calls eternal forces into alliance. This war is also fought
with meditation, and the sign of meditation is silence. Where your treasure
is, there will your heart be also. Prayer provides an expression of the craving
of a man's heart. Prayers are always answered. Sometimes circumstances
change or He changes us. Of course, believing that what happens to us is
always for the best, does not mean we will not suffer. And it is so often very
difficult to believe that what is happening to us, to say nothing of the billions
of others, is "for the best>"
The more than a century and a half of Bahá'í history is filled with suffering.
As I examine Bahá'í history from time to time in this book, I often examine it
in a metaphorical sense. John Hatcher has written about this way of studying
and thinking about history and I leave it to readers with the interest to
examine some of Hatcher's books. I also leave it to readers to study secular
history, especially history in the last century or more. Recent modern history
throws much light on this new paradigm.
The world we entered in this new paradigm was one in which catastrophe
was writ-large. The world a century before, in 1900, had no idea of the
magnitude of the catastrophes ahead. The vast majority of humankind lived
outside the Western world. There was vast and hopeless misery in many
places especially: Russia, China, India and Africa. Again, I leave it to
readers to try and grasp the general story of modern history and the light, if
any, they can find that throws our world a century later in an historical
perspective. I taught history for several decades and I am more than a little
aware of the anarchic confusion that exists in the study of history. This is not
only true of history; it is true of all the social sciences, young and inexact as
they are, and far more complex than the physical and biological sciences.
Complexity faces us all in the study of man, society, and the vast field of
values, beliefs and attitudes, in a word, religion.

Section 2:
The Baha‘i community had already put in place, through the guidance of its
leadership over more than a century-and-a-half, through prayer and
meditation, through sacrifice and suffering, and through much else, an
evolving structural base for community building. During those decades,
filled as they were with appauling suffering across the face of the earth and
unparalleled scientific and technological change, the Bahá'í Faith spread to
every corner of the planet and forged its Bahá'í administration in many
thousands of localities. The latest of the Abrahamic religions, which is what
this new Faith claims to be, entered the 21st century with a structural-base
that was just in embryo, in what you might call the chrysalis phase, a century
before, in 1900. The community-building that has been taking-place in the
last two decades, 1996 to 2016, has been built on this structure, and on the
work of several million adherents in the Bahá'í community. Bahá'í
institutions and the millions of individuals who have been part of its tapestry
over more than 150 years before the emergence of this new paradigm have a
story that I encourage readers to become as familiar with as they possibly
can. This new religion has grown up in the light of modern history and there
is much to study, in some ways, far too much for any of us to really take in
to its fullest. We can but try and, hopefully, we have the interest and the
discipline to make the effort and avoid the massive distractions that beset us
all in this new digital age of print and image-glut.
Community building became a focus for a process that the internationally
and democratically elected body of the Bahá'ís, the Universal House of
Justice, said began, that had its kick-start, at the outset of this new paradigm
in the mid-1990s. Most of my life as a Baha‘i, as far back as the 1950s, and
before that in the lifetime of my parents who were also Baha‘is, during that
first epoch(1937-1963), and its three stages, of Abdul-Baha‘s Divine Plan,
the major goal and emphasis was on building the structure, the institutional
base of this "nascent Faith of Baha‘u‘llah.‖ The House of Justice referred to
present Bahá'í administration in its Ridvan message of 2011 as ―the
harbinger of the New World Order.‖ "The evolving administrative structures
offer glimmerings, however faint," the House of Justice pointed out, "of how
the institutions of the Faith will incrementally come to assume a fuller range

of their responsibilities to promote human welfate and progress."(Ridvan
2012)
Section 3:
The building of the structure of this new world Faith, then, a structure with
many functions, was at the core of Bahai programs and policies, goals and
game-plans, so to speak, from 1921 to 1996, a period of 75 years, if not in at
least the quarter-century before that in the ministry of Abdul-Baha and
before that in the lives of those two-God-men of the 19th century--the Bab
and Bahá'u'lláh. In the last 20 years, 1996 to 2016, the focus has been on
"community" in addition to "structure." Of course, teaching this Faith,
extending the base, the number of localities, the numerical, the statistical,
foundation as far and wide as possible, making a larger group of believers,
has always been high on the agenda of Bahá'í communities everywhere since
the origins of this newest of the Abrahamic religions in the middle of the
19th century. The latest messages from the House of Justice during this
current Five Year Plan, 2011 to 2016, are examples, par excellence, of the
elaboration of the details of this community building focus. This book
attempts to incorporate commentary on the messages from the House of
Justice and national assemblies as they are published, and as they relate to
this new Bahá'í culture. The latest message from the Supreme Body came
out in the first week of May 2013, and I have added passages into the text of
this book from that Ridvan message of 2013. Each message from the House
of Justice serves as a continuing exegisis, an exegisis that goes back well
before the emergence of this new Bahá'í culture in the mid-1990s.
"On each front," the Supreme Body closed its Ridvan message of 2013,"we
see the Bahá'í community moving steadily forward, advancing in
understanding, eager to acquire insights from experience, ready to take on
new tasks when resources make it possible." For readers I leave the pleasure
of studying this message as I am confident many will in the weeks ahead as
the winter in the southern hemisphere approaches, and summer in the
northern hemisphere. I hope, too, that the document entitled Insights from
the Frontiers of Learning, prepared by the International Teaching Centre at

the request of the Universal House of Justice for distribution at the Eleventh
International Bahá‘í Convention, can also be studied in the weeks ahead.
This latest in a series of documents beginning in 1998, a document of some
12,000 words, has been issued to provide a broad overview of the progress
being made across the globe in advancing the process of entry by troops. It
has now been twenty years since the House of Justice began to prepare the
Bahá'í community for "a phenomenon" that can be sustained once it has
started. As a Bahá'í who began his experience in the Bahá'í community in
1953, I remember well when the Guardian referred to this process of entry
by troops. I mention it here in passing because that preparation process is
still on-going in this new Bahá'í culture.
The House of Justice noted, in forwarding this document entitled "Insights
from the Frontiers of Learning," the vital role that the ITC continues to play
in the prosecution of the global Plans of the Faith and its diligent efforts to
capture, in documents such as this one, the richness of the experience of the
believers and institutions on every continent. The House of Justice also
expressed the hope that this material would lend an impetus to the
endeavours of the friends who, in diverse circumstances, were tirelessly
engaged in building vibrant communities. In some ways this latest document,
this "close examination of the pattern of action characteristic of the clusters
at the forefront of learning" coming, as it does, at the completion of the first
two years of this current FYP(2011-2016, is aimed at helping the
international Bahá'í community move from 1200 clusters to 5000 by April
2016.
The International Teaching Center, sometimes referred to as "the ITC", is a
Bahá‘í institution based in the World Center in Haifa, Israel. Its duties are to
stimulate and coordinate the Continental Board of Counsellors and assist the
Universal House of Justice in matters relating teaching and protection of the
faith. The membership of the International Teaching Center is made up of
nine Counsellors appointed by the Universal House of Justice. Membership
terms last for 5 years and new appointments are made immediately following
the International Convention and election of the Universal House of Justice.
There are many messages from the ITC on this new Bahá'í culture as well as
from the UHJ and many NSAs. Readers are advised to: (i) do some Googling
if they want to get a good grasp of the literature now available on this new
Bahá'í paradigm, and (ii) study this latest ITC message since it is the most
comprehensive statement of the current state of play in the achievement of

the goals of this new Bahá'í paradigm.
Section 4:
Some 17 months ago, on 12/12/'11, a particular, a special, message from the
House of Justice was six pages in length and it foreshadowed many
developments in the community in the decades to come. I discuss this
message in detail toward the end of this now lengthy book at BLO. The
Ridvan message of 21/4/'12, one year ago, among many other Ridvan
messages, I will comment on briefly in this book from time to time as I have
already done to some extent. The next Ridvan message from the House of
Justice is due in April 2014 and, at that point, the current Five Year Plan will
be 60% over. The letters from the UHJ to the Iranian Bahá'í community,
while not about the new paradigm explicitly, have certainly contributed their
part to the international Bahá'í culture, and that culture's most newsworthy,
controversial and terrifying maelstrom of turmoil and trouble: the Iranian
Bahá'í community. Those letters to the Iranian community offer a whole
segment of commentary on Bahá'í experience in recent decades, and in this
new paradigm.
While all these messages and all this community-building takes place, in the
form of home visits and study circles, devotional meetings and children's
classes, junior youth and youth activities, inter alia, the process of becoming
a Bahá'í goes on and on for each of us. We each have to be patient with
ourselves to say nothing about being patient with others. This is done little
by little and day by day. Often one dies daily, as St Paul told the Christians
at Corinth; the ego is subdued over a lifetime. Sometimes it is not subdued.
In this new paradigm as in life itself, there are winners and losers. You and I
do not win all the battles. And as Shoghi Effendi once said: "the only real
battles in life are within the individual."
INTRODUCTION #2:<

Part A:
The process I have described above in a few sentences and paragraphs, and
below in many more sentences and paragraphs, is far more complex than the
simple sketch I am outlining, a sketch that goes back to the first intimations
of this Order in the 1840s. ―The unveiled brilliance of the gilded dome that
crowns the exalted Shrine of the Bab,‖ which the House of Justice referred to
in its April 2011 message, is a tribute, a memorial, to the memory of the Man
who was martyred in 1850. It was a martyrdom that acts as a central part, a
critical moment, in the blood-bath in which this new System was born. This
System's structures and functions, its communities and its millions of
believers find their historical origins in the life of the Bab and His Successor
Who initially sketched this System: He Whom God would make manifest,
Baha‘u‘llah. That sketch is found in His voluminous writings as well as
those of His Successor, Abdul-Baha. Still, this international Bahá'í
community is only glimpsing, only manifesting, the first streaks of the
promised dawn that is the promise and vision within the new Order to which
this System has given birth. The full force of its implications are only slowly
developing within the embryo that is the present paradigm. Like the
processes in geology and archaeology, in palaeontology and the other
physical and biological sciences, the wheels of God grind slowly. Often the
process is far too slow for the people of our age and time who far prefer
immediate gratification and instant rewards for effort.
Part B:
Section 1:
What I have written in the above, of course, is my own way of putting
things, my own thoughts, as the rest of this now lengthy book continues to

explore these thoughts, thoughts put on paper beginning in 2007 and
continuing in the six years since then. These were years of receiving
messages from the elected and appointed branches on this new world Faith,
messages which, as I say above, have provided a continuing exegisis on this
new Bahá'í culture. I have also drawn on the thoughts of others extensively.
Some who read this book will say I have drawn on these many sources too
extensively. But I make no apologies for the ample quotations from the
words of others, individuals and institutions. This book has grown over the
last six years largely through the writings of others, institutions and
individuals, and this needs to be emphasized at the outset.
The plane of words and appearances is not the only one on which one truly
and productively meets the Blessed Beauty. The realities of the Cause are
found on the plane of rational thought, personality and raw emotion. But
they are also found on a divine level, in the sphere of the soul where one sees
the world as a mirage, an ash heap, vain and empty, bearing the mere
semblance of reality. Here one sees oneself as a gaged-bird with the potential
to soar in the greatest happiness, joy and freedom to the nest of the bosom of
God. This book has grown as a result of many things of which the collective
memory of the international Bahá'í community and my own individual
memory are the core. The nature and function of individual and collective
memory is, from my point of view, something that is constructed, and I want
to say a few things about that memory below.
Section 1.1: Memory
Remembering often emerges or begins, certainly for me, in an attitude and/or
an emotion, a feeling. The recall is then a construction made largely on the
basis of this attitude or feeling. Its general effect is that of an explanation, a
description, even a justification of the attitude. I am both skeptical and
convinced of the constructive nature of my individual remembering. I also
concede that social organization, in this case Bahá'í administration, gives a
persistent framework into which all detailed recall must fit, and it very
powerfully influences both the matter and the manner of my recall. In other
words, only individuals have the capacity to remember, but preliminary, and,
indeed, prior, to the process of individual recall there exists a mental pre-
disposition that has been at least partly shaped by the social or communal

environment. To speak of the memory of a group is to reify and
transcendentalize. I encourage readers to check-out the meaning of these two
words I have just used because they contain a world of meaning that I don't
want to stop here to explain and discuss.
In the Bahá'í Faith this shaping of memory, this exegisis, is done by the
Supreme Body, an elected institution that is, to use Max Weber's term, the
institutionalization of the charismatic Force that gave birth to this new
Abrahamic religion in mid-19th century. To speak of memory in a group is
to acknowledge both the singularity of individual recollection and its relation
to a surrounding society or community—the global Bahá'í community, and
the global society in which that community is embedded.
It is my hope that, in its small way, this book may help to awaken an
"attitude" of recall, to help bring to the surface a memory, to help create a
"framework" of remembrance that will enable my fellow Bahá'ís to build and
retain a certain consciousness, a consciousness that is intimately connected
with memory; indeed, without memory that consciousness is hardly
functional. As Bahá'ís we need to be aware of the unique and often fragile
communities and environments in which we work, and the difficulties in
trying to resist the homogenizing & degrading effects of much that is found
in modern society. Forgetfulness is driven by many things of which a belief
in progress is but one. A pervasive social and economic dynamic in which
oblivion and novelty feed off each other, flourish in the same shopping mall
as "planned obsolescence," "rampant subjectivism," "blind materialism, and
superficial humanism." Memory is crucial to the reclamation of men and
women‘s full humanity—their sense of a continuity, even a comradeship,
between present, past, and future generations. As the philosopher Edmund
Burke expressed the idea famously in 1790 in his Reflections on the
Revolution in France: "society is a contract, a partnership not only between
those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead,
and those who are to be born."
Without this contract the human race and its sustaining environments are
doomed to become the victims of pernicious and widely ranging cultural and
personal values. The Bahá'í community is not immune to these pernicious
forces. This problem has arisen partly because we have become, almost

overnight, a complex global society, a society that is especially prone to
"social amnesia," to the "refusal or inability to think back." Thinking back to
the past has been for the most part something that has taken place in a local
and or national context. The new global context of over 200 nations is more
than we can handle and our ability to think critically about this planetary
civilization is limited. We find it difficult to use language accurately, to
understand and exercise our democratic rights and responsibilities in this
world framework. We are in many ways citizens of a new world, but we are
also embedded in an old world. We are a world rich in history and values as
well as hopes and resources. The West is a vast and privileged portion of the
globe in which memory and understanding may yet so nourish right thinking
and right action that they become rhizomes.
Without the memories of the past cultural and intellectual continuity is not
possible; there can be no fully comprehended present either for a collectivity
or for an individual. With no remembered past to define and direct the
present, there can be no planned or idealized future. To misunderstand, to not
know the past, is to have no sense of the future. If a person's roots are
shallow, their trunk and branches, stems and offshoots do not grow fully. As
the famous Roman orator, Cicero, put it as the Roman republic was
gradually being transformed into an empire: "to be ignorant of what occurred
before you were born is to remain always a child."
A key element for the realization of our individual destiny as Bahá'ís is
memory; it is also a means by which relatively powerless and poverty-ridden
clusters of cultural and personal identity are able to resist the coercions of
larger powers. These larger powers often possess economic or ideological
systems that can convince them that their own history can be treated either
selectively or as "bunk," to use Henry Ford's words. In view of the possibly
enormous stakes involved, a concerned look at the state of memory in the
Bahá'í community, at what is remembered and forgotten in Bahá'í history
and its culture, could prove both valuable, indeed, intriguing and telling.
The same man, Henry Ford, who proclaimed history "bunk," also invented
the assembly line and the monochrome car. His hostility to history and a
dehumanizing drive towards uniformity are by no means unrelated aspects of
our consumer culture, a system which has every economic reason for

coercing people to live a present-participle existence, an existence of
drinking, eating, sailing, and having fun, in a perpetual present that, even as
it happens, is obsolete by design. Some people may be immune to such
coercion but, if so, it will not be by grace of today‘s educational system
which, under the pressure of the liberal ethos that governs this consumer
culture. This consumer culture has allowed itself, at nearly every level, to be
predicated on a belief in process. This belief in process is at the root of the
notion that the act of thinking and writing about issues and problems is as
important as, or more important than, what is thought or written about. The
idea of memorizing something, for example—a great poem, an historically
important speech, a piece of purple prose from a novel (the Bible, of course,
cannot be mentioned, even for its style)—seems to modern educators and
students to be as pointless as studying Latin or some other "dead language."
It has become, for too many people, sufficient to know a few sentences and
slogans and, not surprisingly since, after school, the greatest influence on
most children are the media. Most of the sentences and slogans that people
find in their minds are from advertisements: "Harvey‘s makes a hamburger a
beautiful thing," "Just for the taste of it—Diet Coke," "Come to where the
flavor is." The issue of educational content and process, theory and practice
is far too complex, though, to deal with here.
The generality of the world's peoples are eager to leave behind them the
memories of the suffering that the decades of the 20th century brought with
them. As a recent document published at the Bahá'í world centre in the year
2000 began: "No matter how frail the foundations of confidence in the future
may seem, no matter how great the dangers looming on the horizon,
humanity appears desperate to believe that, through some fortuitous
conjunction of circumstances, it will nevertheless be possible to bend the
conditions of human life into conformity with prevailing human desires."
The opening page of that review of Bahá'í experience in the 20th century
went on to say that: "such hopes are not merely illusory, but they miss
entirely the nature and meaning of the great turning point through which the
world has pssed in these crucial years." Only as humanity comes to
understand, during these years of this new paradigm, the implications of
what has occurred in the last century and a half will it be able to meet the
challenges that lie ahead. The value of the contribution we as Bahá'ís can
make to the process demands that we grasp the significance of the historic
transformation wrought by the 20th century and especially these early years
of the new Bahá'í paradigm.

Section 1.2 Bahá'í Culture
This history, this Bahá'í culture, is something that must be chosen if we want
to be part of it. It is a history and culture filled with simplicity and
complexity, with peace and violence, with vast diasporas over decades,
leaving home and making new homes. The present Bahá'í culture, like a
landscape, is part of a fascinating and mysterious narrative going back at
least two centuries, if not several millennia. It is a narrative of catastrophe
and slow accumulation, of new generations arising and building on the old,
of the sublime flow of ideas generated by turbulence and tragedy, by heroic
individualism, great, intense, drama, and by irreconcilable forces, and an
immense, a staggeringly massive literature, by a great turning-point in the
world's religious history and fanaticism. "Our greatness rests," writes
Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, "in faithful orbits that circle around the great souls
now living or dead."(Four on an Island, p.119) Often, she continues, "our
preoccupations with our own patterns result in personal tragedy." The prison
we need to be most conscious of is that of self which we carry around with
us wherever we go. This is often a darksome well and a blind pit which our
idle fancies dig over and over again burring us in the process.
Section 2: This Book
If there is any inventiveness here in my work, it is in putting the writings of
others into some warp and weft, some pattern of significance to me, a pattern
I hope is also significant to readers. I hope to outline some of the dynamics
of light and darkness, idealism and disillusionment that are characteristic of
the revolution at the heart of this paradigm. Light and darkness are words
with vast metaphorical implications. The coming of the light into the world
does not attract everyone. The hawk, the owl and the bat all flee in
consternation. Many find the Cause very unattractive; as much as we would
like everyone to come in, we often find our entire lives have been spent with
most of those whom we knew remaining outside the Cause. We should take
heart, though, for--as Moojan Momen points out in relation to the life of
Bahá'u'lláh: most of those who met the Blessed Beauty did not become
Bahá'ís. One's expectations, as one travels the road, the spiritual path, need to

be realistic. A lack of realism often courts disappointment and even
bitterness in the long run. Of course, again, this is not always so. It is
difficult to make any statement that covers the experience of everyone on the
planet. People, personalities, are highly idiosyncratic.
Section 2.1: This Religion
A religion as revolutionary in its origins and development over the last two
centuries, a religion that has grown-up in the light of modern history, has a
different set of issues to deal with than any of the old religions, religions
which are all as busy as beavers trying to become, to remain, to be relevant
in our age of change. This paradigm does not eliminate the issues which the
Bahá'í Faith has faced for decades, indeed, for at least a century and a half.
This paradigm takes to a whole new stage some of the intractable issues that
this Faith has had to deal with for more than 150 years, and attempts to deal
with them in new ways. The growth of this newest of the Abrahamic
religions has been both an amazing, an unparalleled, process, and one filled
with difficulties, tests and problems of all sorts and sizes which anyone who
takes that history seriously and reads extensively is only too aware.
Part C:
There is now, on the internet, an extensive body of work devoted to the
concepts: culture of learning, culture of growth, paradigms, structure,
function, and many other related ideas. You can Google "cultural learning",
"culture of learning", "culture of growth", "organizational culture", inter alia,
and the literature on these concepts is burgeoning. Cultural transmission, so
goes one site, is the way a group of people within a society or culture tend to
learn and pass on new information. Learning styles are greatly influenced by
how a culture socializes its children and young people. Cross-cultural
research in the past fifty years has primarily focused on differences between
Eastern and Western cultures (Chang, et al., 2010). Some scholars believe
that cultural learning differences may be responses to the physical

environment in the areas in which a culture was initially founded (Chang, et
al., 2010). These environmental differences include climate, migration
patterns, war, agricultural suitability, and endemic pathogens. Cultural
evolution, upon which cultural learning is built, is believed to be a product of
only the past 10,000 years and to hold little connection to genetics (Chang,
et. al., 2010).
The above paragraph is but one of dozens which readers, who would like to
widen their understanding of some of the concepts utilized in the new Bahá'í
paradigm, can study. Not all readers here will be interested in many of the
secular and academic useages of terms used in this culture of learning in the
international Bahá'í community, but, for those who would, you may find
some helpful parallel perspectives in the generla field of knowledge. I leave
this with you, with each reader who has their own interests and activities,
time-frames and circumstances, desires and goals---their highly individual
life-narrative.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE END OF THE CURRENT FIVE YEAR PLAN(FYP) in 2016:
By the end of this current Plan, 2011 to 2016, Abdul-Baha‘s Divine Plan will
arguably be one century old and the religion in which this Plan is being put
into action will have some two centuries of historical experience. Much of
our knowledge in life is acquired by experience.(Ridvan 2012) The Author
of the letters providing the details of the Plan for the extension of this Faith
around the world, penned His first words in March and April 1916 nearly
three years after returning from His epoch-making journeys to the West.
Those journeys were described by Shoghi Effendi as ―a service of such
heroic proportions no parallel to it is to be found in the annals of the first
Baha‘i century (GPB,p.279) They were both celebrated and commemorated
during the first two years, 2011 and 2012, of this FYP.
The messages and literature which have flowed in celebration of these 100th
anniversaries has been extensive and has added significantly to the tissue and

texture of this new paradigm. This Plan and this history, going back as it
does into the 19th century; Bahá'u'lláh's life and writings and that of His Son
Abdul-Baha, the appointed and legitimate Successor, is at the core of this
new paradigm. This new Bahá'í culture is inseparable from this Plan and this
history.
It was in September 1911, when Abdul-Baha arrived in London, the city He
chose, the metropolis of the British Empire, as the scene of His first
appearance before the public, that His western tour could be said to have
begun.(Balyuzi, Abdul-Baha, p.141) In the last century, 1911 to 2012, the
light of this Cause has penetrated, suffused and enveloped many a region of
this planet and this process will go on inexorably in the next hundred years:
2012 to 2112. In some ways, Abdu‘l-Baha‘s journey to the West simply
initiated, or perhaps more accurately, extended and began to systematize a
process of teaching in the West begun in 1894, if not as far back as the 1840s
when the first reports of this new religion began appearing in Western
newspapers in Europe and North America. During this centennial period of
that historic whistle-stopping journey, the Bahá'í community turned again
and again to Abdul-Baha's words and His emphasis on the new social forms
that will emerge in this Bahá'í Era.(Ridvan, 2012)
GLOBAL DIFFUSION: A LONG WAY TO GO
This Cause has not suffused the entire planet after the passing of nearly 170
years of the Baha‘i Era(BE): ―that goal is far from being fulfilled.‖(UHJ,
April, 2011) In the course of the evolution of this new paradigm the
international Bahá'í community may see that goal fulfilled. Perhaps during
one of the next major shifts in the Baha‘i administration‘s way of going
about things, so to speak, that goal will be completed. Time will tell when
and how. I have no doubt that this goal will be fulfilled. My belief, like so
many of the beliefs of the adherents of this new world Faith, is characterized

by a sense of its inevitability. It is only a question of time in the ongoing
evolution of this new world Faith, this newest of the Abrahamic religions
when its promise and purpose will be fulfilled. In many ways the work of
―the penetration of that light into all the remaining territories of the
globe‖(UHJ, April 2011) has just begun in this first century, 1911 to 2011,
the first century since the travels to the West of the Bahá'í Faith's exemplar,
Abdul-Baha.
As Paul Lample, one of the current nine members of the House of Justice,
notes in his useful discussion of this new paradigm: ―Of the more than
16,000 clusters at the start of the second Five Year Plan of this new
paradigm in 2006, some 10,000 remained unopened to the Faith and less
than 2% of those that had been opened were capable of taking on the
challenge of growth.‖ (Paul Lample, Revelation and Social Reality, Palabra,
2009, p.104.) The implications of this statement of Lample's, of course,
around the thousands of Bahai communities in dozens of countries is
obvious: this Faith founded by Bahá'u'lláh in the 19th century, has grown
very slowly in many, many places and this slow growth may continue for
some time in many places. It is important, it seems to me, not to infuse this
new paradigm with a problem Bahai communities have had for decades:
unrealistic expectations of the growth in the numbers of believers. The
assumption that numbers will increase by hard work and effort is true, but
only partly and only in some places. In some places this assumption is
warranted. The experience I have had in the 60 years I have been associated
with this new Faith, and the experience I am aware of from my reading and
study of the vast literature of this Cause, leads me to have high expectations
for this Faith's growth. But these expectations have become, over the
decades, more realistic ones due to this Faith's slow growth in many parts of
the globe. My last 60 years of experience(1953-2013) are the basis for my
judgement. My experience often, but not always, makes me feel "sure-footed
in the application of the knowledge I have gained through this
experience."(Ridvan 2012)
The Bahai Faith has grown from some 100 thousand at the outset of the first
organized and systematic Plan in 1937, when my parents were about to first
meet and marry in the lunch-pail city of Hamilton Ontario, to some 200
thousand in 1953. That year, 1953, was a historic juncture in the history of

this Cause for a number of reasons, not the least of which personally, was
that my mother joined the Bahá'í Faith that year. I was into sport, in love
with at least three different girls, busy keeping on top of my school-work,
and growing through my last years of childhood at the time. The Bahá'í Faith
was far out on the periphery of my young life.
The Bahá'í temple in Chigao was dedicated that year; the Ten Year Crusade
was launched and the Shrine of the Bab was completed. It was a big year for
the emerging international Bahá'í community, an historic juncture in the
gradual evolution of a religion which claims to be the newest of the
Abrahamic religions. This Faith now has some 5 to 8 million depending on
what set of statistics one draws on. The subject of numbers, of statistics, has
complex dimensions and the subject is one that seems to raise controversy
from time to time due to the long-standing emphasis on numbers, an
emphasis both inside the Faith and out.
In most places I have lived in my day-to-day life and in many, many places I
have not lived, growth has been 'discouragingly meagre' and, from my point
of view, this has often, but not always, been due to those unrealistic
expectations, among other reasons. This slow growth is also due to many
other factors which this book alludes to from time to time. The whole
question of the growth of this Cause is a complex one with complex answers.
Peter Smith's book(2004), Bahá'ís in the West, gives an excellent overview
of the growth of the Cause from decade to decade, up to 1990. I cannot do
better than refer readers here to this book if they are interested in the
statistical side of this new Faith up to the emergence of this new paradigm in
the 1990s. In the last decade of internet activity, 2003 to 2013, there have
become available a host of sites with statistics for: local, cluster, regional,
state, national and international levels of the Bahá'í community. This book
does not make any attempt, though, beyond some very general observations,
to provide a vast and detailed statement regarding the numbers of men and
women, children and youth, in country after country and cluster after cluster
who are part of this immense global tapestry of believers.
COMPARISONS AND CONTRASTS WITH OTHER PARADIGMS

I could make extended comparisons and contrasts between the current
culture of learning and growth, the new Baha‘i paradigm, and the several
previous paradigm shifts in the Bahai community going well back into the
19th century. I could also anticipate future developments within this
paradigm and future paradigms. In spite of the enthralling, the stupendous,
vision that Bahá'u'lláh gifted to the world, as the House of Justice put it in its
Ridvan 2012 message more than one year ago,regarding the future of
humankind this temptation is also avoided. My own particular proclivities in
sci-fi writing also tempt me in the direction of hypothesizing on the
developments of this Faith in the decades and centuries, indeed, millennia
and epochs, eras and cycles. But I shall resist that temptation.
The scope of what was originally an essay in the middle of 2007, and is now
a book of more than 500 pages(depending on what font-size is used), does
not allow for any detailed comparisons and contrasts with previous
paradigms beyond some very general observations. The elaboration of what
will clearly seem to many like the utopian visions of this world religion is
also something I do not deal with. Such comparisons and such visionary
statements can be found in many published Bahai works, at posts on the
internet for those readers who are interested, and in the talks of various
Bahai speakers--some published and some not. The Bahai vision is so
enthralling that it inspires the optimist and leaves the skeptic and cynic
laughing and somewhat bemused---and I mean this quite seriously, for I have
often read the posts of writers who find the Baha‘i vision too utopian for
words. As I say, though, I only make some general and limited comments
later in this book for those readers who enjoy or who persist in their reading
through these 100s of pages.
The new paradigm, I should emphasize here, is best conceptualized as a
mixture, a dynamic mixture, of past paradigms and present, making-up this
new Bahá'í culture. This new Bahá'í culture has not sprung-up ex nihilo. This
new Baha‘i culture is also not some monolithic scheme superimposed

everywhere and anywhere in the same way. There is what you might call a
case-specific contextualization. This new paradigm is a vast meta-text in
which the smaller contexts, the local communities and our individual lives,
have been cast. This has been the case throughout Baha‘i history, throughout
previous paradigms. As we approach this new meta-context, though, we
must be on our guard that we avoid what has always seemed to me to be our
curious tendency towards oversimplification and absolutism when it comes
to spiritual matters. Our knowledge in many aspects of the individual and
society is notoriously imprecise, a fortiori, in relation to spiritual matters.
Uncertainty, with its implications of trust, is our spiritual condition and it is
quintessential to our spiritual development. So much of the Bahá'í journey is
dynamic and continuously changing, a moving and fluctuating system, a
flexible road-map to all possibilities. There is "an extraordinary reservoir of
spiritual potential" available to the individual to draw on(Ridvan 2012) to
help him or her act and, in the process overcome the "layered veil of false
premises," the apparent "insurmountable obstacles," and "the prevailing
theories of the age" which "seem impervious to alteration."(Ridvan 2012)As
the House of Justice went on to say in this same context in April 2013,
writing about the complexity of this dynamic process:"it does not lend itself
to ready simplification."
UNITY IN DIVERSITY
Unity in diversity has always been the watchword inspite of the best efforts
of individuals to impose some simplistic and sterile uniformity. Each cluster,
each assembly, each community, each Bahá'í, develops in their own way
given the special circumstances of each individual and each community. The
Baha‘i community and the individuals within it in this new paradigm, and in
the old, have been one and all expected to master worldly evils as they have
gone about creating the Kingdom of God on Earth. As they have done this,
of course, they have needed to reject the sins people commit, but not the
sinners. We all need to do battle with our inner demons and not worry too
much about the demons of others. The context for all of this is what you
might call contraries which we so often try in vain to reconcile and balance:

principles of mercy and justice, of freedom and submission, of the sanctity of
the right of the individual and of self-surrender, of vigilance, discretion and
prudence on the one hand and fellowship, candor and courage on the other.
To act in accordance with this new Faith‘s teachings has always been an
imperative and it has always been a challenge. This has often been against
popular opinion, but it has not been against secular authority. This has often
been difficult and it has required a robust optimism. This is true, a fortiori, in
this new Bahá'í culture. A goodly portion of humility is also a prerequisite in
the Bahá'í life since no Bahá'í knows what his or her own end shall be and,
without humility, so many activities simply do not come to fruition. This is
not a religion which guarantees individual salvation through either belief or
good works. The Bahá'í community and its adherents are more interested in
saving the planet. The ultimate judgements about souls is left to God. There
are many people in the world doing good work for humanity, but it is the
Bahá'ís who have the blueprint for the erection of the dam that will in time
stop the flood which, at present, threatens to engulf humankind. At least that
is one way the Bahá'í game plan has been stated all my Bahá'í life since the
1950s and the century in Bahá'í history before I became a Bahá'í. This new
paradigm is, in some ways, just another chapter in the ongoing growth and
development of this latest of the Abrahamic religions.
This nascent Faith of Baha‘u‘llah, this harbinger of the New World Order,
requires of the faithful to labor on His behalf to create that humane Kingdom
in His behalf. Such labor requires method and system and a movement away
from egocentric individual interests toward far broader tasks. This mission
requires a religious obligation; this mission ties individuals into a
community. The purpose is far higher than utilitarian calculations and the
pursuit of material gain. A family of trust and helpfulness exists in this
community and it serves as a natural training ground for group participation
skills. This training ground has an increased specificity in this new Bahá'í
culture. Habits and theories of blame have no place in this paradigm but,
given the nature of human beings, the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune, the lack of personal development in many souls if not most, many
obstacles limit the growth of this new culture in ways similar to the limiting

factors in previous paradigms.
THE PROBLEMS OF BLAME AND COMPLEXITY
AND THE ARDUOUS TASKS AHEAD
Blame is a negative reaction to the limitations we struggle with daily, and
like doubt, which undermines the very basis of that daily struggle, it is a
mental habit that often produces adults more aware of human weakness than
human strength. There is, too, a gradual and inevitable absorption in the
manifold perplexities and problems afflicting humanity as Bahá'ís
everywhere try to put into place the complex structure and increasingly
elaborate community at the heart of this paradigm. We are buffeted by
circumstances and distracted by crises both in the wider secular and religious
world, and in our own relatively small international community. The
arduousness of the task we face in this new paradigm, is one we sometimes
dimly recognize as we aim high and hope for the best. The problem of non-
partisanship, the Bahá'í approach to political non-involvement, has always
provided Bahá'ís with its set of tests and difficulties in a world where often
one's very soul and lifestyle is measured by active stands vis-a-vis some
politicized issue like conservation and mining, abortion and homosexuality,
inter alia.
The tasks we face are not easy. They are often very difficult and the
acceptance of this difficulty at the centre of our psyche is important. There is
a pain at the heart of life and it cannot be denied, although it often is in our
adoption of various kinds of popular psychology like the power of positive
thinking and "she'll be right, mate." All things really worthwhile are, it seems
to be just about by definition, very difficult. Much of the education most of
us have is like a knife without a handle and it is, at worse, dangerous and, at
best, often useless. We labour under so many misconceptions and false
assumptions: literalism, the heavy burden of ludicrous expectations of others
and of our own dear selves, as well as the notion, the falseness, of a spiritual

life not rooted in our animal existence. The totality of the human condition
embraces both the sublime and the daemonic. They have always been part of
the existential realities and they will be seen, ad nauseam, in this new Bahá'í
culture, immersed as it is in the life and the times of this 21st century.
Readers here must acknowledge the magnitude of the ruin that the human
race has brought upon itself during the last century to century and a half. The
loss of life alone has been beyond counting. The disintegration of basic
institutions of social order, the violation-indeed, the abandonment of
standards of decency, the betrayal of the life of the mind through surrender
to ideologies as squalid as they have been empty, the intervention and
deployment of monstrous weapons of mass annihilation, the bankrupting of
entire nations and the reduction of masses of human beings to hopeless
poverty, the rechless destruction of the environment of the planet--such are
only some of the more obvious in a catalogue of horrors unknown to even
the darkest of past ages. A tempest is indeed, sweeping the face of the earth.
As I say above, a failure to accept that pain is always a necessary tiller of the
heart's soil, and the soil of human civilization, leads the believer into a range
of problems that arise when the tests come. This has always been true in this
and in other paradigms right back to the 1840s, as Shoghi Effendi describes
in his Epilogue to the Dawnbreakers(See p. 652)
I MAKE NO PROMISES
I trust that readers who stay with this text will have some reward. Of course,
as in any writing, writers cannot promise and---if they do---it is either at their
peril or it is because of their previous literary successes. This I cannot claim
due to my many unsuccessful efforts to write books and I don't like to
venture into perilous territory, literary and otherwise, if I can help it. I have
developed a more cautionary approach to life as I have come to head into its
evening hours. In the first six years, 2007 to 2013, of the presence of this
book, this commentary on the new Bahai culture, on the internet, this work

has contributed its part---as some posts on the internet do---to an extensive
dialogue on the issues regarding the many inter-related processes, complex
structures and community functions involved in the ongoing changes in the
international Bahai community in these last two decades.
This book at BLO has received more than 15,000 hits at this site alone to say
nothing of the several 1000 hits it has had at other sites. My current
guestimation is some 30,000 hits as of 1/5/'13. This is but one measure of the
extent to which this book has been clicked-on, and if read at least to some
extent. But words, I must emphasize, are one of the least parts of faith; faith I
have often thought is a gift to be lived and, even after several decades, I feel
as if I am a beginner---however much I write in this analysis of the new
Bahá'í culture. I cannot give others faith nor understanding. That is their job.
You can lead a horse to water, goes the old saying, but you cannot make it
drink. My task, and the task of those who are Bahá'ís and who read this
work, is to offer their gifts with a purse heart and a correct motive and to
detach themselves from the responses of those to whom they offer the
chalice, the light, the fire, of the Cause. No one is really adequate to the
Message that we bear and which we offer to others as a gift.
There are many writers in cyberspace who are leading all sorts of horses to
all sorts of drinks. Cyberspace has become, in many ways, a parallel universe
besides the real space we all live in. In real space the small handful of
Covenant-Breakers and people who identify with and refer to Bahá'í sects,
are given not only publicity but a profile all out of proportion to their real
existence, their existence in real space. People coming across these so-called
sects in cyberspace get the distinct impression that the Bahá'í Faith is a house
divided into at least half a dozen sects. In cyberspace the Bahá'í Faith
becomes, for many, just another cult. The terms cult and sect have specific
definitions and meanings to academics who study the sociology of religion,
the history of religion, of religion within the rubric of some other academic
field. The Bahá'í Faith is neither a cult, nor is it divided into sects, but the
casual and uninformed reader is led to quite another opinion as he or she
surfs the net wanting to learn about the Bahá'í Faith and its sects that they
have heard about in some casual conversation. The Bahá'í Faith has always
had people bent on its destruction. This was true in the first years of the Babi
Faith from 1844 to 1848, and this opposition and hatred existed both outside
the Cause and, often, within the Cause itself. Bahá'í history is a fascinatingly
complex story that the internet has given a visibility to for those who want to

study and real about it. Of course, only about one-third of humanity has
access to the internet, and most of the Bahá'í community, most of its 5 to 8
million members live in communities with no internet facility.
TEMPERAMENT AND TEMPERAMENTS: PERSONALITY
CONSTRUCTS AND PARADIGMS
The word ‗temperament‘ comes to us from medieval physiology. A
temperament was seen as a balance of multiple humors, a composite of
multiple psychical forces, a concept for the general trend of the soul.
Temperament was seen, and it is, a vague sensibility, a kind of broad
appraisal of a person‘s attitude. It is a category that spans one‘s nature and
education across the lifespan from childhood to old-age. People's
temperaments guide our attention, but they are also reflections of their past
experiences. Temperament changes, such was the medieval view, according
to the balance of humors in the body; it changes with age, and it is reflective
of one‘s upbringing and general cultural inheritance. A temperament is also
part of the culture of an individual, but it extends beyond the individual into
deep and often unconscious attitudes, habits, prejudices and capacities.
Temperament is both indirectly and directly expressed; it is uncovered
through the analysis of actions. One‘s temperament shows through as a
vague or quite specific and general propensity, the sum total of many
disparate and unrelated acts. It is a broad composite, built and undone, and
rebuilt over the course of a lifetime. It is a psychic and emotional, as well as
rational and irrational process embedded in complex social processes, and
individual inclinations. It lies behind and under and is also within what I am
writing in this book about the new Bahá'í culture. It is also at the heart of
what one does in this new Bahá'í culture as it did in the old paradigms. It is a
reality we all have to deal with in the drama that is our life-narrative and
community life.
In writing this book it is my hope that I have uncovered and exemplified a
certain philosophical-historical spirit which is grounded in the living

specificity of my 60 years of association with this new world Faith. It is a
philosophical spirit echoed among a number of my contemporaries and
historical predecessors in the Bahá'í community. It is a philosophy of the
street and of the neighbourhood, of the local and of the specific, of the
problem-centred and of the community-oriented. It is also playful and
affirmative. It is a type of spirit that contains a genealogical criticism and
evaluation, as well as a social critique. It construes the historical sense as
attitude, perspective, and a way of life rather than as system, as book, or as
an ascetic and transcendental attitude. It means affirming temperament,
locality, and problems. I hope readers who stay with this now lengthy work,
do not find it to be a glib and pervasive criticism, written from a type of
expert contrivance. Although this book contains many criticisms, it is far
from glib and far from contrivance. I see this book as one that has gorwn-out
of experienced conviction over many decades. Still, I do not expect this gook
to receive a popular reception; it is far too long to ever be popular and the
reading public is now drowning in images and print, a glut of stuff that
overwhelms Everyman. There is much else in cyberspace for readers to get
their teeth into and give them pleasure.
My modus operandi seeks out origins and explanations, but only to a limited
extent; it attempts to make interventions into particular habits and attitudes
that I have lived with and observed for decades. The practices of reading and
interpreting, of arguing and analyzing, are each and all woven into the very
field of the new Bahá'í paradigm itself, as a part of its game-plan, its aims
and objectives. My writing has been shaped by a century of tempestuous
violence on the planet as well as the historical and intellectual tradition of
which I am a part---now a global cultural tradition. I write in order to help
heal whatever wounds I find in my life and the life of my society. I also write
to express my appreciation for differences between people, differences
which are part of living together in community. Ironically, I write as much to
create and to clarify problems for readers who come to this book, as to
dissolve and solve them. That is one of many ways I define my writing
exercise here. Some problems are intractable both in my own life and in the
life of my society; others are simple to solve, and still others have already
been solved

GRIEF AND LOSS
"Dealing with grief and loss," as Susan Gammage writes, "is never easy in
this paradigm or at any time. One can not always forgive and forget, and
even as one does, it is often a process that is very slow in working itself out.
Often, it is best not to force oneself to do things for the Cause; not to fret and
worry about what you can't do; one's health, among other factors, often
prevents us from engaging in certain aspects of community life. In cases like
this it is often best to engage in avenues of service which do not interfere
with one's health, or even withdraw into solitude where the forces within can
adjust the balance and you are able to be set on your feet again. We should
not interpret this as a dereliction of duty. Advice from well-meaning Bahá'ís
often acts as a weight; to be told one should transcend one's psychological
problems and not judge is often not good advice at all.(Letter to an
individual believer, 23/10/'94)
It is useful to keep in mind that service to this Cause takes an infinite shading
of forms and styles. The conventional gestures of service are often safe and
secure. Being hurled into forms of service with too much turbulence, too
much distress, is often the cause of withdrawal and inactivity. The so called
and often used term "the inactive-believer" is often the result of this
turbulence. We love the truth, but often dread what it might do to us, and so
it is often necessary to keep a safe distance from the blazing summons that
Bahá'u'lláh has issued on thousands of pages of what is now the sacred Text.
TWO TEXTS: TWO SOURCES
For this writer, and for each Bahá'í, there are two texts: (i) the Book and its
legitimate interpreters and (ii) the forever unfinished, decentralized text of
history—forever supplemented, new chapters being written in all sorts of
places by all sorts of people not especially, not necessarily, in touch with one
another. There is some work of ‗correspondence,‘ and some of ‗production.‘
I write, or so I like to think, as a type of Emersonian-self, exhorting others
through my temperament or because of my particular temperament and

motivation, towards a fundamental faith in the possibility of personality
beseeching others with Emerson to, "affront and reprimand the smooth
mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times."
I also exhort others by means of this book "to hurl in the face of custom,
trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history," that there is a
great responsible thinker and actor, an indwelling God "within me mighty,
powerful and self-subsistent." This indwelling God is working wherever I
work. I belong, as a true man, to no other time or place, and I act at the
center of things. Where he is, there is nature.‛(Emerson, Self Reliance, p.
270). My temperamental prison, made as it is of glass, is also a prism that
reflects and refracts thought so that it might be broken and colorful. I draw
here on Emerson and leave it to readers with the interest to read more of
Emerson. I encourage this reading of Emerson because of what I feel to be
the broad relevasnce of his writing to this new paradigm.
POWER AND AUTHORITY IN THIS NEW PARADIGM
Power, as I conceive it, is not seen as a property, but as a strategy. Its effects
of domination are attributed not to ‗appropriation‘, but to dispositions,
manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, functionings.‛ Power in this sense is not
only something exercised by the powerful, but is a network of activities
carried out by everyone in society each in different ways. In short, power is
something exercised rather than possessed; it is not the ‗privilege‘, acquired
or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of strategic
positions. It is an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the
position of those who are dominated. The operation of power, or rather its
manifestation, is found in particular acts. As such, power does not ‛obey the
law of all or nothing‛ but is rather manifested in localized episodes that have
effects on the entire network in which it is caught up. At the same time,
power cannot be separated for purposes of understanding its operation since
power produces knowledge. There is no power relation without the
correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does
not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. From the
perspective of the theory of power, individuals themselves are products of

the system of power relations. The individual man is already himself the
effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. What I have just
written is a complex subject and I leave it to readers with an interest in the
subject of power to do some reading because it is an important subject in this
new culture of learning.
What I have written in the above paragraph is, to reiterate, somewhat
complex, given the often simplistic view that people have of the concept in
everyday life. In organizations, in the international organization that is the
Bahá'í Faith, authority is the scope of the legitimate power of the elected
institutions of this new world Faith, or legitimate power possessed by
individuals when acting on behalf of these elected institutions. Authority and
power are two different concepts. This authority is conferred through
officially recognized channels within the Bahá'í Faith, and represents a
portion of the power of these elected institutions. For example, a Bahá'í
institution might have the authority to deprive an individual of his voting and
administrative rights. That institution could also provide an authorized
person to determine if a member of the community should have such rights
removed. In contrast, a group of Bahá'ís might have the power to do all of
the above things, but still lack the authority because the actions would not be
legitimate.
Authority in the Bahá'í community can also be seen in situations in which
authority is an institutional function. An elected Bahá'í body, for example,
might hire employees as a standard function of its existence. However, most
of that body's members are not authorized to hire employees. This authority
is passed down through Bahá'í administration to specific individuals
sometimes with limited institutional involvement. Authority and power are
complex entities; they are abstractions about which much has been written
and this book does not go into these two terms as much as it should. Perhaps,
as this book evolves in future years I will deal with these two terms in more
detail. They are important to understand because they lie at the basis of so
much that takes place in Bahá'í groups and in this new paradigm. I encourage
readers, again, to make a personal study of these two concepts and their
relation to the individual and the community. In the process they will be

better prepared for understanding the nature of this new paradigm.
THE LANGUAGE OF PARADIGMS
The language of paradigms has been used across many academic disciplines
and fields of discourse to describe current and shifting understandings of
knowledges, beliefs, assumptions, and practices. Thomas Kuhn (1962) made
the term ―paradigm‖ recognizable with his publication of Structure of
Scientific Revolutions in the very year before the emergence of another
Bahá'í paradigm in 1963---the year of the election of the Universal House of
Justice in 1963. That was the same year--1962--my own travelling and
pioneering for the Canadian Bahá'í community began. For Kuhn, a paradigm
was a collection of shared beliefs, a set of agreements about how the world
may be understood. According to Kuhn, the differences between Newton's
mechanical universe and Einstein's relativistic universe represented a shift in
paradigms. Each of these two approaches to physical science represented a
worldview, or a paradigm, that guideed how scientists saw the world.
Hans Kung (1988), the great Catholic theologian, is among those who has
applied Kuhn‘s understanding of paradigms to religion. He identified several
paradigms that have shaped religious history. Among recent Christian
worldviews are the modern, Enlightenment paradigm and the emerging
Ecumenical paradigm. In comparing these two paradigms, Frederick
Schleiermacher‘s (1996; 2001) contributions that shaped much of modern
liberal theology have been challenged by the pluralism of more recent
ecumenical and interfaith theological understandings (Cobb, 1982; Hick,
1982). The new does not replace the old, yet it does provide an alternative
foundation of thought for understanding contemporary religious practices.
This is also true of the new Bahá'í paradigm: it does not replace the old, but
it does provide an alternative foundation, an altered, an additional, structural,
institutional, organizational scheme or framework, a new language so to

speak. This framework, this structural embellishment, has assisted and is
assisting the Bahá'í community to deal with a multitude of functions: its
emergence from obscurity and the public image it has slowly acquired in the
last several decades; the new horizons and developments in the wider
society; the unfolding educational processes from childhood to old age, the
several stages in the lifespan, within the Bahá'í community; the extension of
the Cause to every corner of the planet and the deepening of those people
who are attracted to this global, this very wide-spread, religion---and much
more, a more that this book discusses in its 500++ pages.
A paradigm as a worldview containing deep-seated assumptions that are so
much a part of a person that it is often difficult to step back and see what the
assumptions are. Such assumptions and views of the world are central to a
person‘s belief system and to the ways that a person lives and acts in relation
to others. In some ways, as this new paradigm has evolved in its first two
decades(1996-2016), Bahá'ís need to be able to practice multi-
paradigmatically, to discern the assumptions most often used within the
Cause as an organization and then use their critical thinking and their
personal skills to move across different facets of the paradigm to accomplish
goals congruent with the values, beliefs and attitudes necessary to implement
the aims and goals of this new Bahá'í culture. This multi-paradigmatic
perspective is useful when deciding what course of action to take when faced
with the many options now open in both individual and community life in
this 21st century. A new complexity has emerged both in the wider world
and in the Bahá'í community.
In the Bahá'í community this is particularly the result of developments in this
new Bahá'í culture of learning and growth, developments that have been
slowly introduced, incrementally developed, and analysed each year in an
ongoing exegisis that is top down, an exegisis that flows from the legitimate
and authoritative Interpreter of The Book. This book, on the other hand, is an
interpretation of this exegisis, and includes a discussion of the philosophical
assumptions and the practical implications of this new paradigm. Paradigms
emerge from many sources and they are seen in practical frameworks based
on these assumptions. The practicval framework here is the multi-
paradigmatic perspective to which I refer is, for me at least and I hope for
others. It is a heuristic tool for approaching so much that is found in this new

Bahá'í culture. The Universal House of Justice has been at the apex of Bahá'í
administration for 50 years, and the paradigmatic shift that has taken place
since I was first a Bahá'í in the 1950s, and especially since the mid-1990s,
has been extensive.
A PARADIGM IN A MULTI-PARADIGMATIC FRAMEWORK
There are several practical and theoretical elements to think about when
considering this paradigm, a paradigm which for me possesses, as I pointed
out above, a multi-paradigmatic framework. Religion and spirituality have a
range of meanings and they provide a category for understanding the context
of broad and diverse spiritual and sacerdotal practices engaged in by
individuals and communities. With Bahá'ís located in some 120,000
localities there is an immense diversity of practice taking place within this
paradigm. The epistemology, the nature of the knowledge, that each Bahá'í
has acquired and will acquire, is as varied as there are Bahá'ís. How does one
know what is true or real? Traditional sources of knowledge in the Bahá'í
community include: intuition, perception, testimony, experience, and rational
thought. Within Bahá'í history there are four common sources: reason,
revelation, tradition, and experience. There are, of course, variations on these
sources and the weight they carry, with some sources dominating others. For
example, the socially hegemonic force of authority is found in Bahá'í
religious tradition, in what Bahá'ís call "the Writings" or The Book. This is
balanced by what you might call individual thought and emotion as an
experiential source of knowledge. This latter source lacks authority but it is
crucial in determining what each Bahá'í does in practice, what he or she does
in the context of this paradigm.
It is here, in the practice and activities of each of the several million Bahá'ís,
that what I call the multi-paradigmatic framework is born. Here, we begin to
see one important factor: the distinction between hard knowledge, which is
capable of being transmitted in a tangible form, the tradition of sacred
writings, and soft knowledge, which is more innate, more experiential, and

more personal. A rational, orderly approach to the new Bahá'í culture and a
feeling that there is ―one best way‖ or a commonly accepted ―right way‖ to
accomplish tasks characterize what you might call a functionalist approach
to the new Bahá'í paradigm. Most assumptions and theories that have guided
Bahá'í practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are also central to a
functionalist approach to this new paradigm. A second approach, an
interpretive approach, to this new paradigm has as its focus consensus and
equilibrium. But this interpretive approach is subjectivist in nature so that the
social reality of the new paradigm for each individual is based on human
experiences and these experiences exist primarily as a human, an individual,
a social construct. Interpretations of what is real in life and what each
individual engages in within the new Bahá'í culture reflect individual
understandings and inter-subjectively shared meanings. The individual
Bahá'í seeks to understand written texts and his or her lived experiences as
well as those of the Bahá'í community.
The populations served by the Bahá'í community, what are sometimes called
targeted or receptive populations, those small pockets of the population
where the limited resources of the Bahá'í community can be brought to bear,
brought to a focus in the teaching and service work of individuals and the
community, are an important part of the community building process in this
new Bahá'í paradigm. Each Bahá'í approaches these pockets of the
population in their own way guided by the institutions of the Cause,
institutions which have been around for decades and new institutional forms
which have arisen only in the last twenty years and which constitute the
evolving institutional nature of the new paradigm. As the House of Justice
pointed out in its most recent Ridvan message released just this week: "it
does not follows that every person must be occupied with the same aspect of
the Plan." In addition, the Supreme Body goes on to say, that each cycle of
the expansion phases of the programs of growth does not need to be directed
toward the same end. Diversity, as always, is the watchword.
As part of this multi-paradigmatic perspective to which I refer above, Bahá'ís
must watch that no trace of paternalism, superiority or prejudice comes into
their interaction with others or estrangement and disaffection will result
among those whom they want to teach/reach. This is not an easy call; much
of the work in the Cause is not an easy call. It never has been. Rather than

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