Bahais Online Bahais Online

  • Skip to content
  • Jump to main navigation and login

Nav view search

Navigation

Search

You are here: Home

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Entries by category
  • Bahai Life by category
  • Search

Login Form

  • Forgot your password?
  • Forgot your username?
  • Links

Mastodon

Home

Commentary on a Verse by Sa'di (audio and intro)

  • Print
  • Email
Details
Category: Alison Marshall's Column
Created: Saturday, 13 May 2006 16:59
Published: Saturday, 13 May 2006 00:00
Written by Alison Marshall
Hits: 4907
Hi everyone,

Here is the recording and introduction to Baha'u'llah's "Commentary on a Verse of Sa'di". Again, it is a work that won't be known to many Baha'is because it is not officially translated. It deals with the concepts of spiritual nearness and distance.

Listen to Mark Choveaux's reading of the commentary:

{sstreamtalk}http://whoisbahaullah.com/Alison/readings/Commentary_on_Sadi.mp3|250|Commentary on a Verse of Sa'di|#5192CA{/sstreamtalk}

The translation is by Juan Cole and is at http://www.whoisbahaullah.com/Alison/sadi.html.

My introduction to the commentary follows.

Read more: Commentary on a Verse by Sa'di (audio and intro)

Announcement

  • Print
  • Email
Details
Category: Alison Marshall's Column
Created: Sunday, 07 May 2006 19:52
Published: Sunday, 07 May 2006 19:52
Written by Alison Marshall
Hits: 4153

Dear loyal readers,

My blog has been going for just over a year now and it has been a great success. But I have decided that I need to cut back on the amount of writing I am doing. I pushed myself too hard last year and have suffered for it. I began to get serious RSI in my arms and now I find it difficult to put my heart into writing any one thing because I am spread too thin. In addition to the writing I do for the Faith, I write for a living and so I am writing all the time. I have therefore decided to cut back, so that I can put energy into the important things I want to develop.

What does this mean? Firstly, it means that I can no longer sustain writing a blog. I do plan to keep writing about the revelation and producing podcasts, but this won't be as often as it has been. I have decided that future meditations will go on Steve's site, Bahais Online: bahaisonline.net. My first contribution to Bahais Online has already gone up, with my short article about the Gospel of Judas.

Read more: Announcement

The Gospel of Judas

  • Print
  • Email
Details
Category: Alison Marshall's Column
Created: Sunday, 07 May 2006 15:38
Published: Sunday, 07 May 2006 00:00
Hits: 6522

Modern scholars knew of the existence of a work called the “Gospel of Judas” from references made to it by Irenaeus of Lyons in his “Adversus Haereses”, an anti-gnostic work he wrote in about 180AD. However, the actual text of the gospel was not known until its discovery in Egypt in the middle of the 20th century. The gospel comprised one section of a manuscript called Codex Tchacos, which was found to date back to between 220 to 340AD.(1)

The authors of the Gospel of Judas belonged to a group of Christian mystics called Sethian Gnostics. They saw the role of Judas in a positive light, rather than the negative one found in the four gospels of the New Testament.

Unlike the New Testament gospels, the Gospel of Judas is not a biography of Christ. Instead, it is made up entirely of dialogues between, primarily, Jesus and Judas. The text has it that Judas was Jesus’ favoured disciple and was given secret knowledge about the Kingdom not given to anyone else. As part of his role as the favourite, Judas was commanded by Jesus to betray him to the Jewish authorities. This task would be extremely difficult and would result in Judas being “cursed for generations”. Nevertheless, it was important because Jesus needed to be ‘betrayed’ and killed in order for his spirit to be freed from the prison of the body and for humankind to be redeemed.

In the tablet "Commentary on a Verse of Rumi" or "Tablet of Salman I", Baha’u’llah deals with an argument from some Islamic mystics that is similar to the one put forward in the Gospel of Judas. The underlying idea in both cases is that some people are destined by God to oppose the prophets in order that God’s preordained decrees might be fulfilled. Therefore, those who do these important evil deeds for God are equal to, or better than, the prophets and/or those who support them.

Read more: The Gospel of Judas

Love and detachment

  • Print
  • Email
Details
Category: Alison Marshall's Column
Created: Saturday, 06 May 2006 14:04
Published: Saturday, 06 May 2006 14:04
Written by Alison Marshall
Hits: 5623

In any discussion about detachment, one of the big issues is love. I haven't spoken about this before, but I will now. I'll tell you a bit about my struggle with it and how I resolved it. You'll appreciate that it's very personal and so I won't get into too much detail.

When I first married Steve, he was the centre of my world. Sure, I was a Baha'i, but Steve was where it was at for me. I loved him and everything in my world revolved around him. I guess that worked out fine initially—we were pretty soppy together. But gradually things changed as Steve's irrepressible addiction for computers manifested itself and I began to feel the effects of 'widowhood'. I became a computer and Internet widow. Steve still loved me, of course, but his world began to stop revolving around me. This caused friction because he was still the centre of my universe.

There is nothing new in any of this. I believe I wouldn't be overstating the matter to say it's a near universal complaint amongst women. Couples marry and then, gradually, the woman complains that her partner is showing more interest in his work (or some such) than in her. She complains that he isn't as romantic as he used to be, and the truth is that he isn't. Something has changed.

Read more: Love and detachment

The reasoning behind detachment

  • Print
  • Email
Details
Category: Alison Marshall's Column
Created: Friday, 05 May 2006 00:59
Published: Friday, 05 May 2006 00:59
Written by Alison Marshall
Hits: 4503

One of the reasons I took to the concept of detachment like a duck to water was that I was compelled by the argument Baha'u'llah puts in its favour. I guess people associate being detached with being moral or a goody-two-shoes. But the concept is based on reason and it is not that Baha'u'llah wants to take the fun out of life or avoid the serious issues of life.

I said earlier that perhaps the best way to see detachment is as a state of being in love with God/Baha'u'llah. What happens when we are in love—with a person or a thing—is that it becomes the centre of our inner universe. And that's where the problem lies. Baha'u'llah points out that everything in this world is contingent—in other words, it's going to die or fall apart or disappear or be taken from us or something. In some way or other, it will change. Over and over again, Baha'u'llah points to the fact that the things in the contingent world are unreliable and not worthy of our trust. The following is one of the clearest statements on this that I know of. It certainly had an enormous influence on me and my outlook on life, the faith and the Baha'i community.

"Say: People of the earth, do you not see the transformations occurring in the land, and the changes the earth is undergoing, such that no second goes by without most affairs therein suffering an alteration? Therefore, what sign reassures your hearts and souls? Woe unto you! Upon what basis have you acted in this vain life? For you have advanced toward your base selves, and turned away from the one who created you, nourished you, and showed greater compassion to you than has any other. Say: By God, you are only as a wayfarer resting in the shade of a tree. But that shade is of necessity ephemeral, and you must not repose your confidence in it or in anything that will pass away. Put your trust in what does not perish, in what endures in the immortality of God, the everlasting, the eternal, the glorious." Baha'u'llah: City of Radiant Acquiescence

I hear Baha'u'llah saying that to put our trust in anything but God is not logical and is vain. Everything apart from God/Baha'u'llah is ephemeral, just like the shade of a tree. How long will that last? It is just a way station, not our home. Why not take refuge in the thing that provides permanent shelter?

The trouble is that the things of the world that we rely on are immediately available to our senses; that is, the people in our everyday life, the society in which we life, even the Internet and the realities people create there. We become immersed in these things because we have ready access to them. The everlasting things that Baha'u'llah is referring to cannot be accessed in that immediate way with the senses. They are unseen realities. Baha'u'llah tells us that God has deliberately set the worlds up this way so that the foolish would be tricked.

"O son of my handmaid! Didst thou behold immortal sovereignty, thou wouldst strive to pass from this fleeting world. But to conceal the one from thee and to reveal the other is a mystery which none but the pure in heart can comprehend." PHW 41

If people really thought about what Baha'u'llah is saying here, a tremendous light would go on and they would see that they have been duped all their lives. You can see this kind of realisation in those who come back from a near-death experience. Such people have actually died and been forced to witness everything that constituted their physical existence vanish into thin air.


Full Story...

Page 7 of 666

  • Start
  • Prev
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • Next
  • End

Copyright

Copyright © 2023 Bahais Online. All Rights Reserved.
Joomla! is Free Software released under the GNU General Public License.