How Can We Escape Our Existential Hell? (Reprint)

(Here's a reprint of a post I wrote that appeared on BahaiTeachings.org c. 4-23-15)

Existential paradise and hell are to be found in all the worlds of God, whether in this world or in the heavenly realms of the spirit… Similarly, ultimate retributions and punishments consist in being deprived of the special bounties and unfailing bestowals of God and sinking to the lowest degrees of existence. – Abdu’l-Baha,Some Answered Questions, pp. 257-259.

Each of us has our own kind of hell.

I’m not talking about an actual place of fire and brimstone—Baha’is believe that old conception of hell simply provides us with a metaphor for the inner, existential torment we all suffer as a result of our actions and the actions of others.

For some people hell happens every day of every year. Luckier ones suffer through it for only periods of time–whether going through severe sickness, or seeing a loved one taken by cancer or car accident. Some hells come suddenly, and many last so long they strain all human endurance.

“Bloody Sunday” Selma, Alabama (1965)

I thought about hell a lot while watching the film Selma this morning. The sole occupant of the movie theatre, I was free to cry and moan openly and loudly at the injustice and hurts, and the sheer hatred from the perpetrators. I prayed “Amen” to God, just as that black congregation did–only my prayer was that God’s tears would fall on those perpetrators and burn them to dust. That somehow, magically, as throughout the Bible, the Hand of God would strike the oppressors down.

That’s one vision of hell, ground to dust without hope of heaven, and sometimes it seems well-deserved by some mortal’s inhumane sins committed against our fellow human beings. When human beings act worse than animals, what chance of heaven do they deserve?

Hell can also take the form of a life of discrimination, poverty, segregation and prejudice, as is too often the case here in America for all its law and order. We’ve seen that kind of hell demonstrated clearly by the murders of unarmed, some even mentally impaired, young men in the news recently, by the murderous warfare in the Middle East, and by the countless rapes of young women taking place across the world, too.

These hates and criminality arise out of dreams–dreams of sexual conquest for the pervert, dreams of wealth for the criminal, dreams of a closed society for the fanatic or terrorist, dreams of conquest and power for the tyrant. These terrible dreams, reminiscent of the Dark and Middle Ages, make it hard to tell the difference in the barbarity between then and now.

All of these living hells require every fair-minded, good-hearted person to work for positive change. No matter which town, village, city, county, state and nation you live in, you can do your part, joining the thousands and millions, even billions that dream of a world without hell.

If we don’t all take part, it will never end.

The Baha’i teachings tell us that hell on earth was never meant to last. We might think centuries of discontent, and greed, and demagoguery will always continue. But they won’t—the world will gradually improve as we adopt a more spiritual civilization, the Baha’i teachings say:

If love and agreement are manifest in a single family, that family will advance, become illumined and spiritual; but if enmity and hatred exist within it destruction and dispersion are inevitable. This is likewise true of a city. If those who dwell within it manifest a spirit of accord and fellowship it will progress steadily and human conditions become brighter whereas through enmity and strife it will be degraded and its inhabitants scattered. In the same way the people of a nation develop and advance toward civilization and enlightenment through love and accord, and are disintegrated by war and strife. Finally, this is true of humanity itself in the aggregate. When love is realized and the ideal spiritual bonds unite the hearts of men, the whole human race will be uplifted, the world will continually grow more spiritual and radiant and the happiness and tranquillity of mankind be immeasurably increased. Warfare and strife will be uprooted, disagreement and dissension pass away and universal peace unite the nations and peoples of the world. All mankind will dwell together as one family, blend as the waves of one sea, shine as stars of one firmament and appear as fruits of the same tree. This is the happiness and felicity of humankind. This is the illumination of man, the glory eternal and life everlasting; this is the divine bestowal. – Abdu’l-Baha, Foundations of World Unity, p. 18.

The Baha’i Faith assures us that the turmoil and travails we now experience are preparing us for a world of peace, safety and felicity, when the hatreds of people have been exposed, excoriated and finally eliminated.

We absolutely do not need to live in an existential hell here on this earth. We have the power in our own selves and with certitude and faith to create a world of justice and enjoyment for all.

The final hell? It happens when we don’t even try, and turn a blind eye to the pain of others. It happens when we have the power to change, and don’t use it. It happens when we miss the opportunity to do something now, at this moment in history.

Part 10: Finding Faith and Finding Yourself, Too

Do you believe, as the majority of religionists do–for example 2.1 billion Christians, 1.5 billion Muslims, 900 million Hindus, 394 million Buddhists and millions of other faith adherents—that God created us in his image?
 
You might find it easier to believe if you think of “image” not as physical but as spiritual, revolving around our souls and spirits, and of course our hearts–the throne of love.

Those-we-love. Whom and what do we love? With a fortunate environment we love our parents, siblings and families, which expands, if we let it, to friends, community, nation and the entire human race. We love those who educate us about ourselves and the world, helping us embark on a lifelong condition of learning. Formal schooling into our teenage years, and hopefully college or trade school beyond, can help us in this modern age to establish our identity and meet its challenges. All of that, of course, depends on the openness of our hearts propelling us forward in our search for self and reality:

    "Only when the lamp of search, of earnest striving, of longing desire, of passionate devotion, of fervid love, of rapture, and ecstasy, is kindled within the seeker’s heart, and the breeze of His loving-kindness is wafted upon his soul, will the darkness of error be dispelled, the mists of doubts and misgivings be dissipated, and the lights of knowledge and certitude envelop his being. At that hour will the Mystic Herald, bearing the joyful tidings of the Spirit, shine forth from the City of God resplendent as the morn, and, through the trumpet-blast of knowledge, will awaken the heart, the soul, and the spirit from the slumber of heedlessness. Then will the manifold favors and outpouring grace of the holy and everlasting Spirit confer such new life upon the seeker that he will find himself endowed with a new eye, a new ear, a new heart, and a new mind. He will contemplate the manifest signs of the universe, and will penetrate the hidden mysteries of the soul. Gazing with the eye of God, he will perceive within every atom a door that leadeth him to the stations of absolute certitude. He will discover in all things the mysteries of Divine Revelation, and the evidences of an everlasting Manifestation." – Baha’u’llah, Gleanings From the Writings of Baha’u’llah, p. 267.

The Baha’i teachings say that “a new eye, a new ear, a new heart, and a new mind…” are the prerequisites in our search for our inner reality. With a new heart and mind we can discover and mold our own view of ourselves and the world. We can enable the progress of our souls, and unravel the mysteries of the Tree of Knowledge. For our individual and collective search to be fulfilled, the discovery of truth is itself the highest goal. We seek reality. As we’ve discussed, both religion and science are also discoverers of reality:
 
     "The foundation of progress and real prosperity in the human world is reality, for reality is the divine standard and the bestowal of God. Reality is reasonableness, and reasonableness is ever conducive to the honorable station of man. Reality is the guidance of God. Reality is the cause of illumination of mankind. Reality is love, ever working for the welfare of humanity. Reality is the bond which conjoins hearts. This ever uplifts man toward higher stages of progress and attainment. Reality is the unity of mankind, conferring everlasting life. Reality is perfect equality, the foundation of agreement between the nations, the first step toward international peace." – Abdu’l-Baha, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 376

Recognizing and accepting truth isn’t easy, or we wouldn’t have such dissension and difference of opinion in the world, too often crippling our ability to improve our individual and collective condition—and recognize reality, both inner and outer. But the signs of positive change and raised consciousness gather more momentum every day. Faith in ourselves and our fellow men and women of the world to do the right thing will attain it.

The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author only (Rodney), and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of BahaiTeachings.org or any institution of the Baha’i Faith.

Part 9: Passing Mental Tests on the Path to Self

[Reprinted from a post(s) on bahaiteachings.org]

In previous parts of this series I have attempted to lead up to the most challenging question of life for a human being, an innate question built into our very core: “Who am I?”

This fundamental question comes with many variations: “What do I want to do” or “want to be,” or “should I be?”

When we ask ourselves this important question, our minds can inform our bodies and spirits in confidently choosing a direction in life. We will, each one of us, decide to make our own path, follow another’s, or choose none at all, letting happenstance guide our lives.

Regardless of our direction, we need our mind to help direct us. Mental illnesses don’t make it any easier–just look at Wikipedia’s long list of them under “mental disorders." Also:

"One in five Americans experienced some sort of mental illness in 2010, according to a new report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. About 5 percent of Americans have suffered from such severe mental illness that it interfered with day-to-day school, work or family." [Source: ABC News, Jan. 19, 2012]

Being bipolar myself for more than 35 years, I can attest to the suffering mental illness can cause–but also to the progress medicine has made in effective treatments, both chemical and behavioral.

One of those effective behavioral approaches—mindfulness meditation, which I discovered during a six-week class during my mental illness treatments—helped provide a key to my own self-awareness. I found that a regular practice of mindfulness not only aids treatment, but also allows fuller expansion of normal life activities and brain functioning.

Often we only think about pleasing our outer senses: touch, taste, smell, hearing, and vision. Yet even comas and REM states prove the mind and spirit still works without them. The Baha’i teachings also name five intellectual, spiritual or inner senses:

…imagination which conceives things; thought, which reflects upon realities; comprehension, which comprehends realities; memory, which retains whatever man imagines, thinks and comprehends. The intermediary between the five outward powers and the inward powers is the sense which they possess in common – that is to say, the sense which acts between the outer and inner powers, conveys to the inward powers whatever the outward powers discern. It is termed the common faculty, because it communicates between the outward and inward powers and thus is common to the outward and inward powers. – Abdu’l-Baha, Some Answered Questions, p. 216.

Obviously our bodies and minds and spirits use these structural tools for discovering the reality we call Me.

 

Precisely by reason of our discoveries into the realities of our own selves over the millennia, we have developed our five inward powers that are equivalent to our outward powers. Those inner powers have now far surpassed our physical powers alone. Our mental powers created technology, which gave us the ability to see inside our own brains with CAT scans and MRI’s, and increasingly learn what it means to be human.

So–why do I exist? The Baha’i teachings say that we all exist to grow spiritually—to fully develop those inner senses and powers.

We can live like the animal, rely only on our outward five senses, take what we want and not care about others’ feelings, or we can utilize our inward, spiritual senses, and find ways to live in harmony and prosperity with our fellow human beings.

If we fully utilize those inward powers of mind and spirit, especially our collective minds as one human family, we can discover and implement solutions to the most intractable global problems. With time, will, and unity of thought and purpose, everything is not only possible, but probable.

The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of BahaiTeachings.org or any institution of the Baha’i Faith.

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IN SERIES:
Global Change for the Next Generation 

 The Creation Story—Balancing Mind and Spirit  

The Seat of the Self—the Human Heart

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written by

Rodney Richards

   Email Rodney Richards

Rodney is a technical writer by profession, having served New Jersey State Government for 39 years. Retiring in 2009 Rod turned his writing skills to prose and poetry, publishing his first in a series of memoirs, Episodes: A poetic memoir, available on Amazon.com. He and his wife of 44 years, Janet, are proud of their successful adult children, and remain active in the community in which they live.

Part 8: The Creation Story -- Balancing Mind and Spirit

Every culture has a creation myth, and many of them have striking similarities—they typically feature the story of the first man and woman, and tell us about the symbolism and meaning of their spiritual universe.

Most of the world’s peoples know the Biblical creation story of Adam and Eve from Genesis. In it, after the seventh day, God first creates the body of Adam, breathes into his nostrils the spirit of life, “and man became a living soul.” Then God created a garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God then took one of Adam’s ribs and created the first woman, Eve.

At first all seemed idyllic eastward of Eden, and God gave them every good thing, and one command, “thou shalt not eat” of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. But the subtle serpent tempted Eve into eating the fruit, saying, “For God doth know that in the day that ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” And Eve ate of it and shared it with Adam who ate also. Upon which God was very displeased, and cast them from the Garden into the wilderness. He even placed cherubim and a flaming sword at the garden’s gate, to make sure Adam and Eve stayed out.

As God had told them, the day they ate the forbidden fruit they died. Beguiled by the world, Adam and Eve’s “fall” metaphorically represented human beings putting their own wills before God’s. Genesis explains why God has sent us his prophets and messengers ever since, to teach us respect, humility, kindness once again–all the virtues we symbolically tossed aside to eat the forbidden fruit, with or without knowing the true implications of that action. In my view, the story symbolizes humanity throwing away our original trust in God.

In the Baha’i teachings, Abdu’l-Baha explains the deep symbolism of the Creation story:

    Adam signifies the heavenly spirit of Adam, and Eve His human soul. For in some passages in the Holy Books where women are mentioned, they represent the soul of man. The tree of good and evil signifies the human world; for the spiritual and divine world is purely good and absolutely luminous, but in the human world light and darkness, good and evil, exist as opposite conditions.

    The meaning of the serpent is attachment to the human world. This attachment of the spirit to the human world led the soul and spirit of Adam from the world of freedom to the world of bondage and caused Him to turn from the Kingdom of Unity to the human world. When the soul and spirit of Adam entered the human world, He came out from the paradise of freedom and fell into the world of bondage. From the height of purity and absolute goodness, He entered into the world of good and evil… – Abdu’l-Baha, Some Answered Questions, pp. 123-124.

I bring up the Creation story, one I learned so well as a Catholic boy, because of the sequence of Adam’s creation. First God created his body from dust, then breathed the “spirit of the Lord” into him, and subsequently God made Eve. They ate of the tree of knowledge and discovered their nakedness, as well as good and evil.

The philosopher in me can’t help but think those symbols mean that the creation of the human body comes first, forever, infused with spirit, giving the body its life-force. This occurs both scientifically and spiritually when egg meets sperm.

Our binary nature, both the lower animal instincts and our higher spiritual yearnings, may have led to Descartes’ concept of mind and body in dualism.

Progress in the physical sciences, and today in technology, have impelled individual and societal developments of the powers of the mind. Just as Freud, Jung and Adler proved with advances in psychiatry and psychology– giving birth to the modern raft of therapies for individuals, couples, families and even organizations–revelations of the mind will continue indefinitely.

But the search for our inner selves, the discovery of the reality of the self, requires more than just a mind. Without the proper tools, the job of finding one’s self becomes practically impossible if we only rely on one of our human components–body or spirit or mind alone. That spiritual search requires interaction and integration of our reasoning and caring abilities, and the proper balance between all three elements of our nature.

We have entered an era of great expansion in humanity’s mental abilities—and now our greatest task is balancing our intellectual powers with our spiritual development. To truly know ourselves, we need all of our powers. 

The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of BahaiTeachings.org or any institution of the Baha’i Faith.

By Rodney Richards

Part 7: Discovering the Life of the Spirit

[This first appeared on October 20, 2014 on bahaiteachings.org]

The great Liberator of Science, Rene Descartes (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650), was a French philosopher, mathematician and writer who spent most of his life in the Dutch Republic. Dubbed the “father of modern philosophy” his work is studied carefully even today. Much subsequent Western philosophy simply responds to Descartes’ writings.

Descartes arrived at a single foundational principle: thought exists. He said “Thought cannot be separated from me, therefore, I exist.” Most famously, we know this as cogito ergo sum in Latin, or in English: “I think, therefore I am.”

The philosophy and realities of Descartes exposed and liberated science from the chains of religious dogma common in Europe and elsewhere at the time. Another way of understanding his profound insight into humankind–”I am body and I am mind”–he labeled “dualism.”  These ideas still prevail today—many people, especially in the western world, define themselves this way.

Dualism does not go far enough, however, in describing human beings. It excludes the most important aspect of human existence–our spirit. Many people have pointed out this glaring omission in Descartes’ philosophy, but George Williams, a British draper, did something about it. Appalled by the terrible conditions in London of young working men in the 19th Century, he gathered a group of his fellow drapers together to create a place that would not tempt young men into sin–the YMCA, which he founded in June of 1844.

I still remember as a nine year old boy in 1959, wearing my white beginner’s Gi (uniform), learning Jujitsu at the Y from a master teacher. The Young Men’s Christian Association, now a worldwide organization, has more than 57 million beneficiaries from 125 national associations.  It aims to put Christian principles into practice by developing a healthy “body, mind, and spirit,” reflected in the sides of this red triangle, part of all YMCA logos.

If Descartes called his mind/body dichotomy dualism, you could call this belief in all three human realities “Triism.”

Billions of people would agree wholeheartedly with the presence of these three realities in all of us. However, physical science has not yet discovered “hard” evidence of what most of the world’s people already know. Faith in a human spirit leads not just to discovering one’s full, true self, but also discovering the best in humankind, as exemplified by the saints, prophets and major messengers of God–manifestations such as Buddha, Krishna, Zoroaster, Moses, Christ, Muhammad and more recently, the Bab and Baha’u'llah.

These revelators, along with many more whose names are lost to history, named spirit as the foundational component of humanity. In all their teachings, the prophets of God and the founders of the world’s great Faiths say the human spirit defines our reality. When we search for our own spiritual core, our soul, these divine educators and messengers say we embark on the true search for our deepest being.

Our own spirit, our soul, gives us life. How could it be otherwise? What animates a human being in the embryo to begin with? In other words, we all live the life of the spirit. In the creation stories and myths of most cultures, we learn that God created man in His own image—which doesn’t refer to a physical image, but a spiritual one. These beautiful passages from the Baha’i writings illustrate that mystical truth:

    O Son of Man! Veiled in my immemorial being and in the ancient eternity of My essence, I knew My love for thee; therefore I created thee, have engraved on thee My image and revealed to thee My beauty. – Baha’u'llah, The Hidden Words, p. 4.

    O Son of Being! Thy heart is my home; sanctify it for My descent. Thy spirit is My place of Revelation; cleanse it for My manifestation. – Baha’u'llah, The Hidden Words, p. 17.

The ancients, philosophers, prophets and manifestations, one and all, have taught and written volumes upon volumes on this powerful theme. They knew that humans will always search for our own spirit, for what makes us who we are.

Life, internal in our minds, or external in our bodies and in the world, impels us on a journey toward the discovery of the most important thing that exists–knowledge of our own selves, and the life of the spirit.

Next: The Creation Story—Balancing Mind and Spirit

[The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of BahaiTeachings.org or any institution of the Baha’i Faith.]

Best,
Rod