Spring is here

I haven't been able to write anything for the past two or three weeks. The reason is the season: spring has once again arrived. Spring, with its life-giving energy and penetrating beauty, possesses such an attractive force that I just simply cannot stay inside. I get up at the dawn, watching the sun rises from behind the tree top, revealing all the hidden beauty that was behind the veil of darkness.

Pink dogwood is now blooming, its color is so vibrating and shining that I can almost see/feel its spirit dancing between branches.

And its tender leaves just emerge, collecting dew drops at the tip of every leaf:

The pure and white flowers have brightened the earth for a short time by their evanescent beauty and purity just as some beloved and devoted souls did to the world.

Hostas seem to respond to the call of spring most readily, making the spring garden green, full and refreshing.

While in the yard at the dusk, sitting in the garden all by myself, the vitality of life and the freshness of spring air always make me wonder the miracle of life and the source of all beings.

I remember reading Guy Murchie's book talking about the last and the ultimate mystery of universe: the mystery of divinity.

"Who or What runs the Universe?

    Is there a plan behind the daisy, the hummingbird,

        The whale and the world?

Who conceived the eye back in the primeval darkness

    Of early evolution?

        Who designed the fish's air bladder in the ancient deep

            As if foreseeing its future as a breath lung upon the dry land?

And out of what beginning evolved the mind?

    By any stretch could mind have been mindlessly created?

        Does science have answer

            To the Voice out of the Whirlwind which asked Job

                'Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts?'

Is the world really drifting along without pilot,

    Steering itself automatically,

        Running its own affairs at random?

            Could the Universe, just conceivably,

                Have created Itself?

 

Surely there is Mystery in this Universe,

    Not only somewhere and somewhen, but everywhere everywhen

        And far, far beyond the scope of man's feeble

            Capacity to comprehend.

For man, puny, mortal and finite,

    As he is in this nether phase,

        Is permitted to visualize neither an end to space

            Nor space without end;

                Nor can he even grasp a start or a finish of time,

                    Nor any sort of beginning that has no beginning

                        Nor any end that has no end.

Hence the Mystery,

    The abiding, pervasive, universal Unknowability

        That many call by the name of God.

But what matters it what you call It?

    It is abstruse, bewilderingly abstruse, and remains so

        Whether or not we accept that somehow by Its agency

            Out of utter nothingness that has arisen

                Everything in the Universe.

 

Its station plainly implies intelligence,

    Indeed Intelligence so far beyond the human

        As to justify the adjective 'Divine',

And this seems to be relative.

    If a human adult represents divinity to a baby or an animal,

        So must the animal be divine to a vegetable,

            The vegetable to a mineral…

Likewise, as wrote Paul to the Corinthians,

    'The foolishness of God is wiser than men',

        And there is presumably a hierarchy in Divinity above

            As well as below us ---

                Even as the doings and thoughts of humanity and of Earth

                    Are but a negligible jot

                        In the eternal consciousness of God,

Even as the horizon of knowledge expands outward from our planet

    Accompanied by the inexorable horizon of Mystery

        Which expands even faster and farther than knowledge,

            Leading man's consciousness

                To new dimensions.

 

Thus doth Divinity

    Embrace all the other six mysteries of life

        Even though callow man comprehendeth it not,

            Even though the Mystery remainsth

                So far beyond earthly finitude

That no eye but God's own Eye

    Hath the capacity to see

        GOD."

Naw Ruz Reflection

Today is Naw Ruz, Baha’i New Year, also the first day of spring.

Happy Naw Ruz to you all,
Happy New Year to all of you and
Happy First Day of Spring to every one.

Spring is my very favorite season. I live on spring, live for spring. Every year at the end of February, I become increasingly restless and impatient. Every year when the spring is about to be gone (end of June) I become very depressed. People would often say that fall is beautiful too, summer is fun, and winter has its merits. True, but it’s not just the beauty of spring I love. I can find beauty in many things: in a picture, in morning dew drops, in an innocent baby face. But spring and only spring is life giving. While the beauty of fall can be enjoyed as a zoom out picture, the energy of spring can be felt in every details: every leaf in spring is new and fresh, every flower full of potential and bringing hope. It is this capacity of spring I love the most when it’s here and I miss when it’s gone. No one can talk me into that other seasons could be mentioned/compared along side with spring. There is phrase in Chinese that describes spring most accurately: “万物复苏, 万象更新”, I wish I could find an English phrase for it. Basically it means in spring everything is revived and renewed, only in a more poetic way.

I wished that spring would stay forever. I wished that there would be no other seasons but only spring. But one year I went to Baton Rouge in Louisiana at the end of March, where winder is not so severe that trees will not die back and flowers keep blooming through winter. When I was there, azaleas were blooming everywhere and trees were green all over. But something is missing: there was no feeling of spring, there was no smell of spring and there was no soul-stirring energy of spring. I puzzled for a moment and it dawned on me that because there they don’t have winter, so they don’t get the feeling and benefits of spring. So despite the degree I dislike winter, if it’s the price I have to pay in order to enjoy my spring, I am willing to go through winter with great patience and confidence that spring will one day for sure arrive. I am not going to trade my winter with a place with all seasons spring-like. "Unless the season of winter appear...the season of the soul-refreshing spring would not come, the fragrant breeze would not waft...”(Abdu’l-Baha)

The lesson learned from the season can be equally applied to human life in particular and human history in general. Suffering has been a mystic topic for many. Human nature seems to be created in such way that we learn most effectively through contrast. Without experience of pain and darkness, it would take a saint to appreciate the joy and light. I remember many years ago, after my husband was naturalized to become a citizen of US, his colleagues threw a party for him. One of his best friends came to him and said: I am jealous of you that what we are born with you have to earn. I often wonder how many who are born here in US truly appreciate the fact that many people in the world are willing to risk their life to come to the shore of this great country.

I like the way Guy Murchie put this point of view in his book: “Most humans seem to believe they want to attain something in life. But do they actually secretly yearn for frenzy, conflict, failure and more struggles? Can there really be joy if there be no pain?” I guess that’s why God has ordained that human’s eternal journey toward ultimate perfection starts here in this earthly plane where light is always followed by shadow, good by evil, health by sickness, wealth by poverty, and knowledge by ignorance.

It is Baha’i perspective that human history goes through a similar cycle of four seasons and right now we are living in the beginning of a new spring of another great cycle of history. The regenerating spiritual energy of spring has been released through the Revelation Baha’u’llah. Just as the energy released by the physical sun of spring will bring life to everything that is alive, while hastening the decay to anything that is lifeless, the new released spiritual energy will break down age long prejudices and out-of-date institutions while brings to life a new world order: “The world's equilibrium hath been upset through the vibrating influence of this most great, this new World Order. Mankind's ordered life hath been revolutionized through the agency of this unique, this wondrous System..." "Soon will the present-day order be rolled up, and a new one spread out in its stead.” (Baha'u'llah).

At this early stage of development, it will take a spiritual eye to see what is happening right now and what lies ahead. Just as the son and the father in this fable demonstrated (from “Thief at Night” by William Sears) :

“Once upon a time, a father and his young son journeyed into a far land, and climbing to the mountain-top, they rested for the night. At dawn, the sun banished the darkness and painted the snow-capped peaks with brilliant orange.

“The son awoke; he saw the glowing sky and the flame-colored mountain-tops. He was a small boy, and could only see through the top of the window above him. He did not understand the brilliance. It alarmed him. He longed for the comfort of yesterday when he was at home with his mother. He wished he had never set out on the journey.

He was sure there was only disaster and fire in the strange new heavens.

“The rising sun warmed the winter snow which had lain cold and barren for so long upon the mountainside. It loosed the drifts and sent cascades thundering down into the valley below.

“The dreadful roaring sound terrified the young son even more than the flaming sky. He rushed to his father and shook him. He roused him, crying:

“ ‘Father! Father! Wake up! Wake up! It is the end of the world!’

“The father opened his eyes. He could see everything clearly through the window which was still too high for the vision of his son.

“He saw the sun-painted peaks with their morning fire. He heard the avalanche of snow released by the warming rays of the Spring sun. He knew that soon it would bring fresh water to the parched land below, restoring life. He understood these things. He took his son by the hand to comfort him.

“ ‘No, my son,’ he said. ‘It is not the end of the world. It is the dawn of a new day.’ ”

Posted via email from The Garden of Heart

To bring about human potentials is the true purpose of creation

Seeking to understand the mysteries of universe always brings me joy and being a Baha'i is specially fun for me because within the Baha'i teachings many mysteries about our existence are explained clearly and logically. The following is one of these mysteries about human being and human progress that I learned lately*.

There is objective existence which we call the reality and within the framework of the overall wholeness of reality, there are four distinct levels of being (see the attached picture):

1. The first and the highest level is that of the essence of God, our Creator;
2. The second level is that of the Manifestations of God, who perfectly manifest all of the attributes of God;
3. The third level is that of the human soul, which has consciousness and endowed with capacity to reflect progressively (potentially) all of the attributes of God;
4. The lowest level is that of the material world, which is totally devoid of consciousness and will.

It is worth noticing that the third level, that of the human soul, is the only level of being that is capable of true irreversible progress. God and the Manifestations are already in perfect states of existence on Their respective levels and therefore have no need of progression. On the other side, the material world only exhibits continual movement within fixed limits. All material systems are composite and temporary. They have a finite life span and progress only to a fixed degree and then decomposition sets in and death is inevitable. Thus there is no real progress in material world, or in purely material sense.

However, the human soul, while created in an imperfect state, has or is endowed with the potential for perfection. From the picture we can see that human beings occupy an unique position among all creations. If we say the material world is the world of imperfection and spiritual world is the world of perfection, and then we may also say that human being is the end of imperfection (highest level in material world) and beginning of perfection (lowest level of spiritual world). Thus to bring about human potentials to reflect all perfections latent within him is not only the purpose of individual's life, but also the business of whole creation. It is not for human being to find his purpose in the universe, but for the creation to find its purpose in helping bringing about human potentials. God has ordained for the training of human beings "every atom in existence and the essence of all created things."

Human capacity is God's given. No one can ever change it and no circumstances of life can destroy it. But this human capacity is latent and needs to be developed. And the development is not automatic. As Baha'u'llah stated in this quote:

"Know thou that all men have been created in the nature made by God... Unto each one hath been prescribed a pre-ordained measure, as decreed in God's mighty and guarded Tablets. All that which ye potentially possess can, however, be manifested only as a result of your own volition."

Effort is needed from our part for our own development. Our soul is threaten by and only by undevelopment. Another day, a friend of mine asked "What is good?" while talking about "Do well by doing good". From Baha'i perspective we may say: that which fosters and advances the process of human spiritual development is good and that which tends to inhibit this development is bad.

How then, one may ask, do we go about to develop our soul?

From the point view of human spiritual development, the material world serves as the womb of preparation for birth into the spiritual world. Let's first take a look at the development of a fetus in a mother's womb. There are two prerequisites for a fetus to effectively progress from one-celled organism to a mature human form which if left out in the physical world could take five hundred million years of evolution. These two conditions are: the special environment of mother's womb and the encoded human DNA information within the cell. The same is true for the development of a human soul . The material world serves as that special environment, but this is not enough for a human soul to progress, just as mother's womb alone will not enable a rock to develop into a human baby. The knowledge brought by the Manifestations of God serve as the second condition for human development. Their teachings may be thought of as the spiritual counterpart of the genetic code. These teachings are recorded (encoded) in the holy writings of the great religions and when the knowledge they contain is implemented, genuine spiritual growth is the result.

Thus, striving to understand and implement the laws that govern the process of spiritual growth is the fundamental task of our earthly lives. In doing so we may generate the appropriate, growth-inducing responses to the circumstances of our lives and thereby profit from the unique opportunities for our spiritual growth with which God has endowed this life.

*Ref.: "The Law of love enshrined" by Hatchers

What makes you happy?

Yesterday, we read the article (Is Happy Catching?) in which we learned: “that good behaviors — like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy — pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses…And the same was true of bad behaviors — clusters of friends appeared to “infect” each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking.”

So according to this finding, our own happiness or unhappiness is no longer our own private business. Knowing or not, willing or not, we are spreading our own mood around not only to our family members, but also to our friends, our friends of friends…It’s almost like that we are contributing to a reservoir of happiness/unhappiness of our society, and in turn the net of this reservoir will have impact on each of us. Living really is a serious business.

It is in this context, I found this article published a few years ago of research results by some psychologists that what really makes people happy:
The science of happiness
One of studies showed that the following eight steps that makes one's life more satisfactory:

1. Count your blessings;
2. Practice acts of kindness;
3. Savor life’s joys: pay close attention to momentary pleasures and wonder;
4. Thank a mentor;
5. Learn to forgive;
6. Invest time and energy in friends and family;
7. Take care of your body;
8. Develop strategies for coping with stress and hardships;

To identify what really makes us happy could help us to deliberately do those things more frequently so that we will stay in happy mood more often and in turn we help people around us living a happier life. Just like Fowler, one of the researchers in "Is Happy Catching?" said that their work had inspired him to listen to upbeat music before he arrives home from work so he will be in a good mood when he greets his family. “I try to get myself in a mental space where I’ll be happy,” he says. “Because I know that I’m not just having an impact on my son, I’m potentially having an impact on my son’s best friend’s mother.”

If you don't mind, you may like to share with us what makes you happy so we may learn from each other.

A Matchless Day (09-09-09 and on Wednesday(9 letters))

Quote for today:

"This is a matchless Day. Matchless must, likewise, be the tongue that celebrateth the praise of the Desire of all nations, and matchless the deed that aspireth to be acceptable in His sight..." --Baha'u'llah

Have A Good Day with a flower with 9 petals

Our Nonrandom Universe

In science, if something is caused by chance, we say that something happened randomly. The word “random” to me possesses such a magic power that anything happened in the world if we don’t know how it happened, we attribute it to random chance.

Yet randomness can be easily calculated out using simple math. It was told by mathematicians that the randomness of large, complex numbers, generally speaking, is not provable. There, any process involving as many billions of creatures for as many billions of years as is the case in earthly evolution as liable to be influenced by something besides blind chance. Of course we have all heard the old suggestion that if enough billions of chimpanzees were somehow set to typing manuscripts for enough billions of years, chance alone would ultimately enable them to write all the great works of literature. But it is easy to show the absurdity of the notion, for, if there are 50 possible letters, numbers or punctuation marks that might be put in any of the 65 spaces in the average line of the average book, a chimp would have one chance in 50 of getting the first one right. Then, for each of the 50 possible symbols, there would be 50 different possibilities for the second space, giving him one chance in 50 times 50 or 50^2 of getting both spaces right. Thus his chance of getting all of the first three spaces right would be one in 50^3 , and of getting all 65 spaces right: one in 50^65.

But 50^65 works out to be equal to 10^110. If we suppose that chimpanzees type out one letter per second, and we know there are less than 10^8 seconds in a year. It would take a billion chimpanzees for 10^84 billion years to type out just one line of book in right order. To compare, it only took about 600 million years (less than one billion) for a single cell organism to evolve into a current form of human being. 10^110 is an unimaginably big number. In fact it demonstrates conclusively, I’d say, that not even one line of any book or speech can originate purely by chance in this finite universe. There just isn’t space or time enough. So something else has to be behind things, somehow guiding them. And that, one might say, is a kind of mathematical proof of divinity – depending of course on your definition.

Ref.: "The Seven Mysteries of Life" by Guy Murchie