Parts One through Three of this series have introduced Bahá’u’lláh, sketched out His major conceptions of human nature and the development of humanity, then presented collective endeavors, all from the twentieth century, that have set our human family on a course toward global maturity and peace.
I said “on a course toward” because we’re at the beginning of Eons of Light after Millennial Darkness…
Certainly, humanity has produced an abundance of light-giving conditions; it’s just that the darkness of the animal side of our nature has held us back from the full splendor we’re capable of reflecting.
The document that inspired this series of posts, Who Is Writing the Future? Reflections on the Twentieth Century, is a landmark of rational spirituality, a call to awareness of the full potential of our human family when we live and act within a unity of consciousness.
The section of Who Is Writing The Future? that this post is focusing on is short but the actual words are very high-minded, while displaying a practicality that’s sorely needed by our global community. I can’t match the document for its poetic yet reasonable presentation, so, here is the original:
“To appreciate the transformations brought about by the period of history now ending [the twentieth century] is not to deny the accompanying darkness that throws the achievements into sharp relief: the deliberate extermination of millions of helpless human beings, the invention and use of new weapons of destruction capable of annihilating whole populations, the rise of ideologies that suffocated the spiritual and intellectual life of entire nations, damage to the physical environment of the planet on a scale so massive that it may take centuries to heal, and the incalculably greater damage done to generations of children taught to believe that violence, indecency, and selfishness are triumphs of personal liberty. Such are only the more obvious of a catalogue of evils, unmatched in history, whose lessons our era will leave for the education of the chastened generations who will follow us.
“Darkness, however, is not a phenomenon endowed with some form of existence, much less autonomy. It does not extinguish light nor diminish it, but marks out those areas that light has not reached or adequately illumined. So will twentieth century civilization no doubt be assessed by the historians of a more mature and dispassionate age. The ferocities of animal nature, which raged out of control through these critical years and seemed at times to threaten society’s very survival, did not in fact prevent the steady unfoldment of the creative potentialities which human consciousness possesses. On the contrary. As the century advanced, growing numbers of people awakened to how empty were the allegiances and how insubstantial the fears that had held them captive only short years before.
“‘Peerless is this Day’, Bahá’u’lláh insists, ‘for it is as the eye to past ages and centuries, and as a light unto the darkness of the times.’ In this perspective, the issue is not the darkness that slowed and obscured the progress achieved in the extraordinary hundred years now ending. It is, rather, how much more suffering and ruin must be experienced by our race before we wholeheartedly accept the spiritual nature that makes us a single people, and gather the courage to plan our future in the light of what has been so painfully learned.”
If you’d like a copy of the full document as a download, here are a Word .doc and an Adobe .pdf file.
Spiritual Quote :
“Man is like unto this lamp, … but spiritual splendors are like unto the light within the glass. No matter how translucent the glass may be, as long as there is no light within, it remains dark. Likewise, man, no matter how much he advances in material accomplishments, will remain like the glass without light if he is deprived of the spiritual virtues. Material virtues are like unto a perfect body, but this body is in need of the spirit. No matter how handsome and perfect the body may be, if it is deprived of the spirit and its animus, it is dead. But when that same body is affiliated with the spirit and expressing life, perfection and virtue become realized in it.”
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Promulgation of Universal Peace, p. 303
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