Month: April 2021

Tarikat (17min video)

This is another video that I find touching — I have no idea how accurate/authentic it is, but it feels real. It’s a sufi ritual, apparently filmed in a small gathering in Turkey, and I think it will look a little strange if approached without empathy.

Increasingly I think the Sufi longing, the goal of mystical union with God, while literally impossible, is still at the heart of all religion, as opposed to the “follow the rulebook and your ledger will be positive” approach. Kind of like trying to write down the number π — it can’t be done, but you can get closer and closer.

The website Sifter of Dust is named after a story retold by Baha’u’llah in the Seven Valleys:

One must judge of search by the standard of the Majnún of love. It is related that one day they came upon Majnún sifting the dust, his tears flowing down. They asked, “What doest thou?” He said, “I seek for Laylí.” “Alas for thee!” they cried, “Laylí is of pure spirit, yet thou seekest her in the dust!” He said, “I seek her everywhere; haply somewhere I shall find her.”
Yea, though to the wise it be shameful to seek the Lord of Lords in the dust, yet this betokeneth intense ardour in searching. “Whoso seeketh out a thing and persisteth with zeal shall find it.”

It feels like there’s a progression in religious history (I’m way oversimplifying here) of our approach to God — In the Old Testament, the Israelites as children in need of repeated discipline by Moses; in the New Testament, The idea that God doesn’t just discipline & punish, it’s love and protect, and sacrifice; and in the mystical writings of Bahá’u’lláh such as the Seven Valleys, the metaphor of God as lover. (this was actually the source of the rule that Priests and Nuns can’t marry, they are married to God or to the Church).

It’s not that older Revelations aren’t as mystical, there have been hermits and seekers in every one (I plan to write a short note on a vision of Julian of Norwich), but maybe as our civilization progresses, that mystical strain will be a little more mainstream, diffused in individual consciousness a bit more.

I almost never watch TV, and very rarely movies; of the movies I do see and like, I almost never feel a need to see them again. But the SF movie “Arrival” (2016, plot summary in Wikipedia) fascinates me, and I’ve probably watched it a dozen times.

A good SF story is a chance to ask “what if X were different than it is in our world, what would that mean? How would things be different?” This one primarily asks “what if we weren’t limited by time, but could see the future as well as the past?” and secondarily asks “how will we react if aliens land?”

Louise, the protagonist, is shown gradually experiencing her future in flash-forwards as she goes beyond the limitations of temporal perception; in that future she marries someone, they have a child with some happy moments, but who dies very young of a disease, followed by the marriage splitting up. The question she asks is, knowing this future, will she still go ahead on that path? and of course this is a romance of sorts, so yes she will. This is sensitively presented, I think, although the movie doesn’t really deal with temporal paradox issues.

This is the more interesting to me because I believe we are told as Bahá’ís that our experiences in the next world won’t be limited by time as they are here. One analogy I saw used was to think of our life here as a VCR tape, where jumping around in time is tedious, vs. a DVD in the next world, where it’s pretty easy to jump around. That comparison only goes so far, since we really can’t imagine being outside of time.

When I was about 15, I ran across a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I found it pretty challenging and only made it through the introduction. But that was some intro; what I remembered was that Kant demonstrated that Space and Time don’t really exist. Actually I misunderstood it somewhat, but to me then, his proof was: If you sit and think, eyes closed and ignoring the outside world, even your body, you cannot conceive of space and time not existing; the closest you can get is empty space and nothing happening in time. So the very fact that you can’t escape them in your mind means there is no way to show that they are not categories created within your own mind, and thus there is no way to prove that they do exist apart from our minds, objectively. At 15 this was hot stuff.

The other Bahá’í concept in the movie is that the Aliens wanted us to be unified and work together, and so they came in 12 different vehicles, each at a different location on earth; each would hand out 1/12 of the total message, so that we would have to share info to get the total. And in the movie, most humans were suspicious of a divide & conquer approach, where the aliens get us to fight each other. This is what humans have done to each other, so of course we suspect them of the same approach. And so there is footage of riots, sabotage, suicides, and all kinds of panic. This is pretty standard for a SF film on aliens, but as I compare my reaction to it back when I first saw the film, vs. now, it isn’t as convincing now. I think that’s because I’m getting more optimistic about our ability to change and grow (where by “our” I mean especially young people, not a creature of habit like myself).

The Faith is still in an early stage of history (this is year 178 BE), and numbers & resources are relatively few — but those limitations inspire a directness and sincerity in communication that to me can be rare in the current world. This short video, according to https://carmelfutures.com/pages/anotherworld, was put together by parents meeting after their children were asleep each evening; they “crafted a vision” for the world their children would inherit. Online, during the pandemic, as far as I can tell. Not slick; low-budget probably. But I find it so touching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T6R33WOjK0