Author: rgrunloh

Last week I was talking to a very bright and inquisitive 4th-grader, born in Africa and now living in Tucson. He was asking about “machines that make machines”, i.e. how factories can make all of the machinery we see around us (cars in particular), and the built-up nature of cities compared to simpler villages. He noted that large cities were springing up in Africa too, next to traditional villages.

Five or six years ago, I was looking forward to an eventual happier and more peaceful world, and I visualized it as like our existing environment–cars, technology, buildings, but distributed evenly and fairly throughout the world, with poverty and materialism eliminated through education and the Bahá’í Faith. The poor areas of the world would become more like us, of course.

Then in October 2017, the UHJ released a film honoring the bicentenary of the birth of Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892), in the form of a survey of Bahá’í life in various areas of the globe. Much of it is what I expected to see–people in elegant cafes discussing the important issues in life, doing projects to help their neighborhoods, the Millennium as a do-it-yourself toolkit rather than a golden city in the clouds of Heaven.

But the opening scene was a “primitive” village, probably in Africa (why don’t videos have footnotes?), where people were preparing food in a very traditional way, and happy in the absence of the comforts I’m used to in the USA. It’s only about 1 minute, but I puzzled for a couple of years about why that scene was placed first, instead of the elegant urban Café of the next section. I didn’t think it could be accidental.

When I was around 4 or 5, I was staying at my grandfather’s in small-town Illinois. Although he was well inside the town, he still had a tractor in the garage, and a fairly large front yard where the grass would be allowed to grow to 6 or 8 inches. In the summer evenings we saw a lot of fireflys, “lightning bugs” as blinking lights throughout the twilight in that yard. It was a connection to the natural world I don’t have in the city now.

Whoso cleaveth to justice, can, under no circumstances, transgress the limits of moderation. … The civilization, so often vaunted by the learned exponents of arts and sciences, will, if allowed to overleap the bounds of moderation, bring great evil upon men. Thus warneth you He Who is the All-Knowing. If carried to excess, civilization will prove as prolific a source of evil as it had been of goodness when kept within the restraints of moderation. (Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings, CLXIV)

For another view on the question of having space to live alongside nature, a random news headline today:

Wealthy California town cites mountain lion habitat to deny affordable housing

At first glance, the town of Woodside may look more like a sprawl of mansions built on big-tech billions than crucial habitat for threatened California mountain lions.

But town officials might suggest looking again.

The wealthy San Francisco Bay area suburb has said it cannot approve the development of new duplexes or fourplexes to ease the statewide housing shortage because it encompasses the habitat of the elusive wildcats. …

Looks like this is not so much about having the natural world nearby as about keeping poor people further away.

Update Feb. 9, 2022

I left this post kind of disconnected because I didn’t know just how to tie everything together, and maybe I didn’t need to. But today’s BahaiTeachings post by English custom-furniture maker Philip Koomen better expresses what I was searching for, a balance between modern tech and local natural beauty.

Martin Luther King day is a good time to link to a 2-part article on The Bahá’í World site with a historical perspective on racism in the United States:

The Bahá’í response to racial injustice and pursuit of racial unity

Part 1: 1912-1996

Part 2: 1996-2021

This site is the online continuation of a series of “yearbook-like” compilations of Bahá’í history, published from 1926 on. I like the longer-form perspective articles it has. Two others I liked are:

A new cycle of human power: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s encounters with modernist writers and artists

Reading reality in times of crisis: ‘Abdu’l-Bahá and the Great War

On a tangent, I’m making a list of recent new Bahá’í terminology with a goal of taking notes on their meanings. Often new developments need naming to be understood, and I hope this is what’s happening:

• building capacity
• elevated conversations
• involvement in the discourses of society
• reading the reality of […]

Julian, recording a vision of Christ she had ca. 1373:

“And in þis he shewed me a lytil thyng þe quantite of a hasyl nott. lyeng in þe pawme of my hand as it had semed. and it was as rownde as eny ball. I loked þer upon wt þe eye of my vnderstondyng. and I þought what may þis be. and it was answered generally thus. It is all þat is made. I merueled howe it myght laste. for me þought it myght sodenly haue fall to nought for lytyllhed. & I was answered in my vnderstondyng. It lastyth & euer shall for god louyth it. and so hath all thyng his begynning by þe loue of god. In this lytyll thyng I sawe thre propertees. The fyrst is. þt god made it. þe secunde is þet god louyth it. & þe þrid is. þat god kepith it.”

— chapter V, “Westminster Cathedral Treasury, MS 4”, ca. 1450, according to Wikipedia

in modern English:

And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, it seemed, and it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and I thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for I thought it might suddenly fall to nothing for little cause. And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it; and so everything has its beginning by the love of God.’ In this little thing I saw three properties; the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; and the third is that God keeps it.

What I find fascinating is this phrase: “I thought it might suddenly fall to nothing for little cause”. We expect to wake up on a solid planet with a predictable sunrise and stable objects, including our own bodies, houses, the moon in the sky. And yet there are signs that this is a teaching tool for the occasion, like a lesson written on a chalkboard, newer lessons will appear later.

• matter is mostly empty space, and our cell phones get signals that come through our bodies and walls, or they wouldn’t work. Atoms are little solar systems.
• normally we can sit back and observe that matter, and rely on it, but at the smallest levels (quantum), looking at their behavior changes that behavior — is that like a teacher saying “how can I help you?”
• if you visualized the world as a beach ball balanced on an invisible fountain of water, the water pushing just enough to hold the ball motionless, it would look stable. But in the journal from Julian, she did not at first see “all that is made” as stable at all, she knew it had to be “kept” by something, but needed reassurance that it would be.

I think this is a very impressive short film (23 min.). Via the article at bahaiblog.net: “Set in the 1800s, the film imagines a conversation between two bickering prison guards at the fortress of Chihriq in north-western Iran where the prophet known as the Báb was imprisoned”. I sent out an email calling this “Bahá’í Grunge” but that wasn’t really the best phrase.

From the interview with the writer/director, one thing that today’s audience might miss is that the female guard is actually playing a female disguised as a male, which happened sometimes in the past according to the histories, I think possibly in the US Civil War too. Personally I find that hard to imagine, but as far as I know, at that time no woman would have been allowed to leave the house alone and unveiled, let alone have a job; and often we see what we expect to see.

Today is a Bahá’í holy day, the anniversary of the birth of Bahá’u’lláh (Nov. 12, 1817, but translated into the lunar calendar = Nov. 7 this year). This is the equivalent of Christmas for christians, thankfully not encrusted with the layers of commercialism that have grown over “the holiday season”. But the event is itself a gift to us, like Christmas was. My sister wants to know what I want for Christmas, and actually I can’t think of a single material thing to tell her. Instead this prayer written by Bahá’u’lláh expresses it today, for me. I picture all of us living in a nice tall shady forest:

Glorified art Thou, O Lord my God! I give Thee thanks inasmuch as Thou hast called me into being in Thy days, and infused into me Thy love and Thy knowledge. I beseech Thee, by Thy name whereby the goodly pearls of Thy wisdom and Thine utterance were brought forth out of the treasuries of the hearts of such of Thy servants as are nigh unto Thee, and through which the Daystar of Thy name, the Compassionate, hath shed its radiance upon all that are in Thy heaven and on Thy earth, to supply me, by Thy grace and bounty, with Thy wondrous and hidden bounties.
These are the earliest days of my life, O my God, which Thou hast linked with Thine own days. Now that Thou hast conferred upon me so great an honor, withhold not from me the things Thou hast ordained for Thy chosen ones.
I am, O my God, but a tiny seed which Thou hast sown in the soil of Thy love, and caused to spring forth by the hand of Thy bounty. This seed craveth, therefore, in its inmost being, for the waters of Thy mercy and the living fountain of Thy grace. Send down upon it, from the heaven of Thy loving-kindness, that which will enable it to flourish beneath Thy shadow and within the borders of Thy court. Thou art He Who watereth the hearts of all that have recognized Thee from Thy plenteous stream and the fountain of Thy living waters.
Praised be God, the Lord of the worlds.

A follow-up on the previous post–

The 20th century artist Giacometti has done some drawings that show our world as mostly empty space with thin lines holding it together; they remind me of the particle traces that commonly illustrate physics experiments.

Here’s one of his drawings:

And here’s a lovely montage of a physics particle-trace image with a photo of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá superimposed over it:

(linked from another post of Vahid Ranjbar’s, on ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s Tablet of the Universe)

This is leading me to visualize the world as a very complex series of mathematical operations (for lack of a better word) which in turn generate matter (probably space too). Unfortunately I can only make vague noises about math, I lost track at calculus, so maybe my admiration is misplaced. But we do know our physical world, and the atoms comprising it, are mostly empty space, and that’s the feeling Giacometti’s drawing evokes.

On a similar topic, Mandelbrot sets and fractals were popular in the 80’s and 90’s; there was even a ms-dos program called fractint for generating them, which I had a lot of fun playing with. A good book on some of the research is James Gleick’s “Chaos: making a new science” originally published 1988.

(The movie is Arrival, which I mentioned before)

I’ve been following the writing and videos of physicist Vahid Houston Ranjbar for a while (isn’t that a wonderfully international name? Persian, American, Indian) but somehow failed to notice this post from 2017.

… On first blush it would seem a ridiculous violation of … physics to “remember the future”. But when I think about it more, I must confess it takes a bit more thought to understand why we don’t remember the future in the way we can remember the past. If we suspend for a while what we ‘think’ we know about causality, it is not immediately obvious why …

He also has a series of videos on youtube on the theme of the Platonic Ideal way of viewing the world vs the Materialist view. And this video which he did is an introduction to a Bahá’í view of the changes to our world that started mid-19th century.