QUEUEUPLOADADMINLOGOUT

..HomeAuthor searchTitle searchDate searchJournals/SeriesBrowse language New Chronology Site map

..

.>>Essays and poetry by Ron Price

About this document (click for more) editqeditAbstract:The building of the community & administrative structure of this new world Faith was at the core of Bahai programs & policies, goals & game-plans, so to speak, from 1921 to 1996, a period of 75 years, and as far back as the last years of the 19th century.Notes:Part 1:

This book, of which this document at BLO is Part A, is 830 pages font 16, and 710 pages font 14. The book has 280 thousand words. It contains reflections and understandings regarding the new Baha'i culture of learning and growth, what amounts to a paradigmatic shift, in the Bahai community. This international community found in over 230 countries and territories, as well as an estimated 150 thousand localities, has been going through this shift in its culture since the mid-1990s.

This Faith had its origins in mid-19th century Iran with a century of several critical precursors going back to the middle of the 18th century. The new Baha'i culture or paradigm, which is the focus of this book, has just stuck its head above the ground, so to speak. This new culture of learning and growth will be developing in the decades ahead, arguably, at least until 2044, the end of the second century of the Baha'i Era(1844 to 2044), and perhaps beyond into that third century of the Baha'i Era, 2044 to 2144. Time will tell when the next paradigmatic shift will take place in the international Baha'i community, a community I have now been associated with for more than 60 years: 1953 to 2015.Part 2:

Comparisons and contrasts are made to several previous paradigm shifts in the Baha'i community, as well as the Babi community, the major precursor community out of which the Baha'i Faith emerged by degrees from the 1850s to the 1860s. Thoughts on future developments within this paradigm, and future paradigms, are suggested. In the first nine years, 2007 to 2015, of the presence on the internet of this commentary, this book, it has contributed to an extensive dialogue on the issues regarding the many related and inter-related processes involved in the many ongoing changes since 1996 in the international Baha'i community and its 5 to 8 million adherents.This work is dedicated to the Universal House of Justice, trustee of the global undertaking which the events of more than a century ago set in motion. The fully institutionalized charismatic Force, a Force that historically found its expression in the Person of Baha'u'llah, had effloresced by a process of succession, of appointment and election, at the apex of Bahai administration for half a century by the end of April 2013.I have also written this book as a form of dedication to, by some accounts, an estimated 20 thousand Baha'is and Babis who have given their lives for this Cause from the 1840s to the second decade of this third millennium. I have also dedicated this book to the many best teachers and exemplary believers--those ordinary Bahais--who have consecrated themselves, indeed their lives by sensible and insensible degrees, each in their own ways, to the work of this Faith.

This book has also been written partly in memory of what has come to be recognized as a large and intrepid band of early Bah men and women who blazed a trail for those of us who have followed, and the ever-growing, ever-evolving global Bah community that they helped to birth.

I am also grateful to have been in the warm embrace of many Baha'i communities, a heterogeneous mix of people who have often tested me to my limits, and I them, but who taught me a great deal through the chrysalis of social interaction and experience over my more than 60 years of association with this newest, this latest, of the Abrahamic religions. Finally, I have written this work in memory of my maternal grandfather, Alfred Cornfield, whose life from 1872 to 1958 has always been for me a model of an engagement in a quite personal culture of learning and personal growth.Part 3:

This book is the longest analysis and commentary on this new Baha'i paradigm that is currently available in the Bahai community, although several other books, which deal with this new Baha'i culture to some extent, have appeared since this book was first launched in cyberspace in 2007. The overarching perspective in this book is a quite personal one that attempts to answer the question: "where do I fit into this new paradigm?" Readers are left to work out their own response to this question, as readers inevitably must, now and in the decades ahead, as this new paradigm develops a life of its own within the framework already established in the first two decades of its operation: 1996 to 2015.

The question now is not "if" but "how" each Baha'i will engage themselves, will participate, in this new paradigm as the first century of the Baha'i Formative Age comes to an end in 2021, and as the years beyond in this third millennium continue to challenge all of humanity in ways we can, at this point, only dimly imagine.See alsobahai-library.com/price_pioneering_four_epochs.

Reflections on a Culture of Learning and Growth: Community and Individual Paradigm Shifts: Part A:A Contemporary, Historical, Futuristic and Personal ContextbyRon Price2008PREAMBLE #1:

Section 1:

This book is 830 pages font 16, and 710 pages font 14, in length with 280 thousand words. It is divided into two Parts: Part A which is this document at Bah' Library Online(BLO), and Part B which is also at BLO and can easily be accessed by interested readers by typing the words "culture of learning" into the "Title Search" box at the top of the access page. It was necessary to divide the book into two Parts after some 15 years in the development of the new Bah' paradigm as continuing elucidations and commentaries on its structure and function, an ongoing exegisis, became part of an extensive literature. This division into Parts A and B was also due to the limitations in the size that is allowed for each document at BLO. The book contains reflections and understandings regarding a new Bah' culture of learning and growth, what amounts to a paradigmatic shift, in the Bahai community. It has been going through this shift since the mid-1990s.

This newest, this latest, of the Abrahamic religions, has been developing a new culture in the last two decades, from 1996 to 2016. This new culture, or paradigm, will also be developing and refining, expanding and consolidating,in the decades ahead, arguably at least until 2044, the end of the second century of the Bah' Era(1844 to 2044), and perhaps beyond into what will be the third century, 2044 to 2144. Time will tell when the next paradigmatic shift will take place in the international Bah' community, the second most wide-spread religion on the planet according to several sources.

Comparisons and contrasts are made to several previous paradigm shifts in the Bah' community, as well as shifts in the nature and definition, the teachings and expression, which the Babi community went through in its short existence of some ten to twenty years. Thoughts on future developments within this paradigm and future paradigms are suggested as the Bah' community evolves in the decades and centuries ahead. The Bah' Faith is, in many ways, a religion with the very future in its bones and tissues, its veins and arteries, its cells and atoms.

In the years 2007 to 2015 during which this book, this commentary, has been available on the world-wide-web, this work has contributed to an extensive dialogue on the issues regarding the many related and inter-related processes involved in the new Bah' paradigm. There have been many changes in the international Bahai community in the last twenty years as this new Bah' culture has been developing. This community which exists in more than 230 countries & territories, and in a guesstimated 150,000 localities, across the planet is what you might call a very wide church. This is putting the subject somewhat colloquially, though, for the Bah' Faith hardly resembles a church at all; nor is it a sect or a cult, a branch of an old religion, a denomination or an ism. It does not exist among the dozens of wasms, the dozens of outworn shibboleths that fill the spaces of our planet with their useless weeds, long ago having outlived their use and purpose.

Shibboleths are customs, principles, or beliefs that distinguish a particular class or group of people, especially long-standing ones regarded as outmoded and no longer useful to the human race. (Note: the last statistic available on Wikipedia for the Bah' Faith listed 127,000 localities in 2001. Readers with an interest in statistics will find Wikipedia a helpful source across a range of numerical figures for the international Bah' community. Since 2001, the Bah' community has continued to expand; any numerical figures after the turn of the millennium in 2001 are, at best, guestimations on my part, drawing on annual reports of several national Bah' communities, communities which publish their statistics annually. It should be emphasized, though, that this new paradigm has, in its first 20 years, 1996 to 2016, placed far less emphasis on numbers than it did in the previous decades of its expansion, previous decades when I was associated with this new world Faith as far back as the 1950s.

Still, the growth in the international Bah' community according to one source, Adherents.com, shows some 6 to 8 million. That site also enumerates the 20 largest national Bah' populations, and the 20 countries with the largest proportion of Bah's. The source given by Adherants.com is for the year 2000. The numbers are "estimated Bah' statistics from David Barrett, World Christian Encyclopedia, 2000; Total population statistics, mid-2000 from Population Reference Bureau (http://www.prb.org). I have no figures for 2015.

Section 2:

This work is dedicated to the Universal House of Justice, trustee of the global undertaking which the events of more than a century ago set in motion. The fully institutionalized charismatic Force, a Force that historically found its expression in the Person of Bah'u'llh, had fully effloresced by a process of succession, of appointment and election, at the apex of Bahai administration for half a century by the end of April 2013.

I have also written this book as a form of dedication to, by some accounts, an estimated 20,000 Bah's and Babis who have given their lives for this Cause from the 1840s to the second decade of this third millennium. The religious and cultural meanings of martyrdom & witnessing, and their role in Babi history are found discussed in detail in a thesis submitted for Master of Arts for the Dept. of Religious Studies at the University of Toronto in 1997. I have also dedicated this book to the many best teachers and exemplary believers--those ordinary Bahais--who have consecrated themselves, indeed their lives, to the progress of this Faith.

This book has also been written for what has come to be recognized as a large and intrepid band of early Bah men women who blazed a trail for those of us who have followed, and the ever-growing, ever-evolving global Bah community that they helped to birth. I am grateful to have been in the warm embrace of many Bah' communities over my more than 60 years of association with this newest, this latest, of the Abrahamic religions. I have been tested to my limits more times than I can count, and I know I have also tested the limits of others, both in my family and in many of the Bah' communities with which I have been associated over those 60 and more years. The Bah' Faith is not a tea-party, although there are often times when it seems to resemble a party atmosphere due to the highly social nature of this religion.

Finally, I have written this work in memory of; firstly, my maternal grandfather, Alfred Cornfield, whose life from 1872 to 1958 has always been for me a model within my own family of an engagement in a quite personal culture of learning and personal growth; and secondly, the many others who have been my mentors in life, others whose learning or experience, or both, has been an inspiration from my late teens when I began to read seriously in the social sciences and humanities, and when I began to take part in the community life of a religion which had come into my family's life back in 1953 when I was just nine years old.

Section 3:

THE BADI CALENDAR

The letter of the Universal House of Justice dated July 10, 2014, with its attachment about the Bah calendar, was a great surprise to many of the friends in the Bah world. To clarify several technical issues involved and to appreciate the timing and understand the implications of this message, this article is offered to the readership of this eminent journal. In this epoch-making message that launches a unified Bah calendar, the Universal House of Justice pointed out to us: The adoption of a new calendar in each dispensation is a symbol of the power of Divine Revelation to reshape human perception of material, social, and spiritual reality. Through it, sacred moments are distinguished, humanitys place in time and space reimagined, and the rhythm of life recast. The same message drew attention to the fact that the launching of the new calendar will further unite the Bah world. The friends in the West had always known, through books such as God Passes By and The Dawn-Breakers, that many Bah historical dates were recorded and mentioned based on the lunar calendar of Islam. They had been also aware that a few Bah anniversaries were being observed in some countries in the Eastin accordance with the lunar calendar, while the rest adhered to the dates of the solar calendar.

To provide for resolving this disparity, the Bah texts stipulated that the Universal House of Justice had to determine the locality in the world that should be used as the Bah meridian and the manner in which the Bah calendar could be adjusted to enable the Birthdays of Bahullh and of the Bb to occur on two consecutive days, as indicated in Bah texts attributed to Bahullh Himself. In its letter of July 10, 2014, the Universal House of Justice gave its answers to these two questions. As of Naw-Rz 2015, the Bah meridian will be the city of Tehran, where the spring equinox will determine the first day of the Bah year. From that year onward the two Birthdays will be internationally observed according to a lunar reckoning within the solar calendar, the dates of which will be announced in good time by the Universal House of Justice.

The Writings and Utterances of Bahullh, such as those published in Gleanings from the Writings of Bahullh, clearly stipulate that Tehran was indeed the mother of the world, the source of the joy of all mankind, the holy and shining city and the land of resplendent glory. What other city had been so praised by the Blessed Beauty? It seems Tehran was destined to be the meridian of the future World Order. To an Oriental pilgrim Shoghi Effendi once said that the Prophet Muammad had called Mecca the mother of villages, but Bahullh had conferred the title mother of the world to His native city. As to the question of the observances of the Twin Birthdays, as indicated in Note 138 of The Kitb-i-Aqdas (pages 224225), what Bahullh meant by the two birthdays being as one day (in Questions and Answers #2) was that they should fall on two consecutive days. This is confirmed in a letter written on behalf of the Guardian. To explain fully this provision in the Aqdas, I will quote the following passage from Note 138 mentioned above:

In the Muslim lunar calendar these [i.e. the anniversaries of the Births of Bahullh and the Bb] fall on consecutive days, the birth of Bahullh on the second day of the month of Muarram 1233 A.H. (12 November 1817), and the birth of the Bb on the first day of the same month 1235 A.H. (20 October 1819), respectively. They are thus referred to as the Twin Birthdays and Bahullh states that these two days are accounted as one in the sight of God (Q&A 2). I will discuss the calendar in more detail below.

ROLES STATUSES and IDENTITY

Roles and statuses are more diffuse in this 21st century, and a personal sense of identity is the result to a higher degree from structures and narratives pieced together by individuals from many sources. This idea is found in: (i) Dominique Bouchet, The Lost Bond and the Good Life: Identity, Family and Couples in a Social-Philosophical Perspective; (ii) The Good Life: More than One's Self, Ed. Niels Jakob Harbo, 2004, pp.149-68; and (iii) Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Individuals must be able to engage actively in the construction of their roles, at any moment navigating from one "reality" to another, mobilizing themselves in sense-making actions. Individuals become entrepreneurs of their own lives, inventing and reinventing identity by means of actions and choices. Consequently, it becomes essential for many organizations, and especially the Bah' Faith with its highly diverse membership spread over more than 230 countries and territories, to provide an attractive narrative framework of identity and purpose within which the individual can construct and reconstruct his or her personal narrative. This new culture of learning and growth does just that and has been doing it with greater efficacy as the years have gone on in the last two decades: 1996 to 2016.

This new Bah' culture has been, is & will be a response to changing communication needs both outside & within the Bah' organizational framework. This Faith has long recognized the importance of creating a strong organizational culture as a means to establish feelings of organizational uniqueness. From the perspective of management and metaphors, stories and discourse practices have been used strategically to constitute approved frames of interpretation. Such practices influence the members' perception of organizational life and values. Similarly, there is a recognition of the strong link and necessary coherence between organizational identity, that is, what members of organizations perceive as their own and the organization's values, vision and mission, and corporate identity. Corporate identity is the organization's identity, or brand, communicated to stakeholders outside the organization. This has been a slowly evolving entity since at least the 1980s, if not in the decades before for possibly a century or more, and it has been enhanced many fold in this new Bah' paradigm. To put this another way, the public image of this Cause has been enlarged and articulated in a much more specific framework of values and beliefs since the mid-1990s.

THE STRATEGY OF NARRATIVE

The strategy of individuals and organizations using narrative proceeds from an understanding that identity is constructed actively by subjects. As former collectively defined understandings of roles and identity have disintegrated in recent decades, individuals are no longer primarily oriented by common, predetermined logics. Formerly, individuals relied on preordained or inherited roles and status to make sense of their lives. Today, however, roles and statuses are more diffuse, as I say above, and identity results to a higher degree from structures and narratives pieced together by individuals themselves. They must be able to engage actively in the construction of roles, at any moment navigating from one "reality" to another, mobilizing themselves in sense-making actions. Individuals become entrepreneurs of their own lives, as I say above, inventing and reinventing identity by means of actions and choices. Consequently, it becomes essential for organizations to provide an attractive narrative framework of identity and purpose within which the individual can construct and reconstruct his or her personal narrative. After 60 years of going to Bah' meetings and interacting with literally 1000s of people, both within the Bah' community and within dozens of other communities I have watched this process in fine detail. This is a somewhat complex subject which I will leave to readers to examine to the extent their interest engages their reading habits. The internet is now awash with sources and resources for individuals to further their intellectual and academic, their social and psychological proclivities.

However complex and confused the scene, the House of Justice emphasized in its Ridvan 2015 message, "yet there is reassurance in the knowledge that, amidst the disintegration, a new kind of collective life is taking shape which gives practical expression to all that is heavenly in human beings. We have observed how, especially in those places where intensity in teaching and community-building activities has been maintained, the friends have been able to guard themselves against the forces of materialism that risk sapping their precious energies. Not only that, but in managing the various other calls upon their time, they never lose sight of the sacred and pressing tasks before them. Such attentiveness to the needs of the Faith and to humanitys best interests is required in every community. Where a programme of growth has been established in a previously unopened cluster, we see how the initial stirrings of activity arise out of the love for Bahullh held in the heart of a committed believer."

"Notwithstanding the orders of complexity that must eventually be accommodated as a community grows in size, all activity begins with this simple strand of love. It is the vital thread from which is woven a pattern of patient and concentrated effort, cycle after cycle, to introduce children, youth, and adults to spiritual ideas; to foster a feeling for worship through gatherings for prayer and devotion; to stimulate conversations that illuminate understanding; to start ever-growing numbers on a lifetime of study of the Creative Word and its translation into deeds; to develop, along with others, capacity for service; and to accompany one another in the exercise of what has been learned. Beloved friends, loved ones of the Abh Beauty: We pray for you in earnest on every occasion we present ourselves at His Holy Threshold, that your love for Him may give you the strength to consecrate your lives to His Cause."

Section 3.1:

Narrative patterns and operations provide ways to make sense of life's myriad elements, for seeing life as meaningful. Stories, as Ricoeur writes, are a means of creating an interpretation of life, to avoid the meaninglessness of a life unexamined. Life is, he writes, "in quest of narrative". Individuals seek "concordance," or harmony, among the countless components of existence. Through narratives, logical connections and cohesion emerge among the many disparate actions, impressions and events that occur over time. Emplotment, as Ricoeur writes, enables the subject to gather and organize life's many elements, which enables an interpretation and understanding of them. This new Bah' paradigm is made to measure for individuals to enhance the articulation of their life-narrative.One decisive characteristic of the individual in this new Bah' culture is his or her response to the call of a quest: an existential journey with tasks to accomplish and obstacles to overcome. The medieval knight slayed the dragon; the modern hero, participant in this Bah' paradigm, uses knowledge, skills and talent to battle both his inner life and the external challenges. The vast and complex framework of Bah' activity provides an implicit model for an individual to quest through concrete descriptions of community work which demands both individual expertise and passionate personal involvement.

This new culture requires individuals with a conscience; ethical considerations play a central part in the construction of the individual's personal and professional identity. In these organizational-participant stories, experts and specialists are staged as young and powerful characters in pathos-based stories of how to make the world a better place for humankind. To be seen as "making a difference" is a powerful part of professional and personal self-fulfillment, as exemplified in the advertisements. As the House of Justice points out in its Ridvan 2015 message the call to support the work "evokes a response in every heart that aches at the wretched condition of the world, the lamentable circumstances from which so many people are unable to gain relief. For, ultimately, it is systematic, determined, and selfless action undertaken within the wide embrace of the Plans framework that is the most constructive response of every concerned believer to the multiplying ills of a disordered society."

The human desire to make sense, and create coherence, out of life's flux of experiences and offerings, by holding out narrative models for prospective identity-making, lies at the core of this new paradigm. The communicative strategy of offering a story into which the participant can write himself or herself is not only a break with traditional genres of engineering discourse, but also an acknowledgement by corporations that organizational identity is flexible and can be shaped by stories, of which the individual narrative is one. It is also this mutability that allows for the narrative process of self-creation. At the same time, the narrative model offered in this culture rejects scepticism towards science, technology and progress, by asserting that science, and the company that uses it, is a means to change the lives of individuals for the better. They are based on assumptions that the world is, after all, improvable and that an individual can make a difference.

Section 3.2:

This new culture makes direct appeals to individuals to convey the value of the Cause to others; this is at the core of the teaching and consolidation, service and social activism aspects of the Bah' community. The emphasis placed on the individual, on developing his or her talents, and on cultivating ambition for the sake of both self-fulfillment and community cohesion; as well as the emphasis placed on the wider community results in a bond between the individual, the Bah' community and the wider society. Through the narrative framework of individual stories, this new culture tries to appeal to the identity and aspirations of the specialist and create organizational scenarios in which professional and personal quests can be fulfilled. In writing him or herself into the story of the community then, the individual utilizes a narrative model as a tool for creating coherence, and finding meaning, in professional and personal life in organizational and social contexts.

Of course, this process with both simple and complex parameters, does not always result in making an appeal to everyone who comes in contact with a Bah' and/or the Bah' community. Each Bah' community has its own history; some communities have grown into the millions in the last century, at one end of the growth spectrum, & some communities become stagnant with growth becoming an impossibility and even resulting in decline in membership. In many localities the growth in this new paradigm has been extensive, but in thousands of localities this has not been the case.

Statistical estimates of the worldwide Bah' population are difficult to arrive at. The religion is almost entirely contained in a single, organised community, but the Bah' population is spread out into almost every country and ethnicity in the world, being recognized as the second-most geographically widespread religion after Christianity, and the only religion to have grown faster than the population of the world in all major areas over the last century. The 5-7 million figure for Bah's worldwide almost certainly started with the first publication of the World Christian Encyclopedia. Before that appeared, no third party figures were available.

Official estimates of the worldwide Bah' population come from the Bah' World Centre, which claimed "more than five million Bahs" as early as 1991 "in some 100,000 localities." That was five years before this new Bah' culture came into being by degrees from the mid-to-late 1990s. The official agencies of the religion have published data on numbers of local and national spiritual assemblies, Counselors and their auxiliaries, countries of representation, languages, and publishing trusts. Less often, they publish membership statistics. In recent years, the United States Bah' community has been releasing detailed membership statistics.

Section 3.3:

In the 1930s the Bah's of the United States and Canada began requiring new adherents to sign a declaration of faith, stating their belief in Bah'u'llh, the Bb, and `Abdu'l-Bah, and an understanding that there are laws and institutions to obey. The original purpose of signing a declaration card was to allow followers to apply for lawful exemption from active military service. The signature of a card later became optional in Canada, but in the US is still used for records and administrative requirements. Many countries follow the pattern of the US and Canada.

Other than signing a card and being acknowledged by a Spiritual Assembly, there is no initiation or requirement of attendance to remain on the official roll sheets. Members receive regular mailings unless they request not to be contacted. The fact that the religion is diffuse rather than concentrated is the major barrier to demographic research by outsiders. Surveys and censuses (except government census, which ask individuals their religion in many countries) simply cannot yet be conducted with such a scope, especially not at the level required to accurately gauge religious minorities. In some countries the Bah' Faith is illegal and Bah's endure some degree of persecution, making it difficult for even Bah's to maintain a count.

The World Christian Database (WCD), and its predecessor the World Christian Encyclopedia, has reviewed religious populations around the world and released results of their investigations at various times. The Bah' Faith has consistently placed high in the statistics of growth over these various releases of data: 1970 to 1985, 1990 to 2000, 2000 to 2005, and across the whole range of their data from 1970 to 2010. From the mid-1960s until 2000, the US Bah' population went from 10,000 to 140,000 on official rolls, but the percent of members with known addresses dropped to fifty percent. Bah' community life often places demands both psychological and social on those who join its ranks, demands that prove to be more than the new member bargained-for. And so it is when the bloom comes off the rose, so to speak, and the new Bah' comes to realize just what it is that he or she joined. The initial spark of enthusiasm loses its excitement, its attraction, and the person either resigns or simply becomes inactive. They cease to take part in Bah' community life and often they can not be contacted. The growth of the Bah' community across more than 230 countries and territories is a highly varied and complex narrative.

Most denominations make no effort at all to maintain a national membership database and must rely on local churches or surveys of the general population. Local church membership rolls are often maintained poorly because there may be no need for an official membership list (Bah's at least must maintain accurate voting lists) and local congregations sometimes do not provide their denomination's membership data even when asked. Counting American Jews, half of whom are married to non-Jews and the majority of whom do not attend a synagogue, is immensely difficult. Estimates for the numbers of American Muslims and Eastern Orthodox often vary by a factor of two. I mention these other faith communities, as they are often called, because the entire field of statistics is often a dog's breakfast to use a term I have come to appreciate after more than 40 years of living Downunder. Australia in one of the most secular and skeptical, cynical but delightfully honest and humorous communities on the planet; I have slowly come to appreciate and enjoy its vast landscape and its cultural complexities which have grown on me by sensible and insensible degrees since I arrived here in my mid-twenties from Canada.

INTRODUCTION TO A NEW BAHA'I PARADIGM

Context: 1796 to 1996

Part 1:

From the last years of the 18th, to the last years of the 19th, century; from the early years of the twentieth century, to the first years of that fin de siecle decade, 1990 to 2000, a large group of men and women were themselves engaged in one of the greatest paradigm shifts in history. The first of these men and women were connected with the precursors of the Babi-religion(1796-1843); the next group with the Babi-religion itself(1844-1863), then another group with Bah'u'llh(1863-1892), and then yet other groups in a wide variety of ways with Abdul-Baha(1892-1921), then with Shoghi Effendi(1921-1957) and, finally, with the Universal House of Justice(1963-1996). One and all, and in a myriad of ways and means, circumstances and situations, they laid the foundation for what has become, in the last 20 years, a new culture of learning in the international Bah' community. Through this vast array of shared membership and affiliation, activity and enterprise, over two centuries they took part, knowingly and unknowingly, in a new, non-western, spiritual movement, engaged in a wide-ranging transnational reform enterprise. They were the earliest forerunners, and then eastern-born and western-born followers of the Bah Faith, an Oriental religion originating in mid-nineteenth century Persia whose twin founders, the Bb and Bahullh, claimed to have inaugurated a new universal era of peace, religious harmony and social progress.

A modern religious movement, the Bah faith has resisted the equation of modernism or feminism with secularism, and religion with secular and partisan politics. Instead what was for many decades seen as a Movement gradually became an independent, a separate, a new religion with its own scriptures and laws, its own calendar and holy days, its own saints and heroes. It gradually escaped the gravitational pull of the religion within which it had been 'birthed.' In similar ways that Christianity became a new religion, and not a Jewish sect, the Bah' faith had by the late 1920s, and more and more as the decades of the 20th century advanced, become a world religion, spreading its membership across virtually every country on the planet by the 21st century. The Bah's saw this religion they belonged to, under the guidance of its appointed and elected leadership from 1921 to the present, as a means for the liberation of men and women everywhere, and the foundation for a new Order. This group of eastern and western men and women not only exemplified a form of millennial religious enthusiasm in their adoption and promotion of the newest, the latest, of the Abrahamic religions, the Bah faith, and its mythology; but, more significantly, they worked to inaugurate a new World Order predicated on the spiritual and social equality of people everywhere, and the vast literature and quite detailed teachings of the Central Figures of their religion.

Part 1.1:

The Bah' calendar, also called the Bad calendar (bad means wondrous or unique) was first used by Bbism and then the Bah' Faith. It is a solar calendar with years composed of 19 months of 19 days each, (361 days) plus an extra period of "Intercalary Days". Years in the calendar begin at the vernal equinox, and are counted with the date notation of BE (Bah' Era), with 21 March 1844 CE being the first day of the first year, the year the Bb proclaimed his religion. The Bah' calendar's implementation has changed over time. The calendar was first implemented and used by the Bb faith and then adapted for use in the Bah' Faith, with some changes. However, the Bah' scriptures left a number of issues regarding the implementation of the calendar to be resolved by the Universal House of Justice, the governing body of the Bah's, before the calendar could be observed uniformly worldwide. Until 20 March 2015 the calendar was locked to the Gregorian calendar with the new year always being March 21. However, on 10 July 2014 the Universal House of Justice announced provisions that will enable the common implementation of the calendar worldwide, beginning at sunset 20 March 2015. Beginning in March 2015 the calendar will no longer be locked to the Gregorian calendar and the new year will start on the day of the vernal equinox. The period from 21 March 2014 to 20 March 2015 is the year 171 BE. This elaboration of the calendar is just one of many areas of increasing specificity, and increasing complexity in the functioning of the Bah' community globally during this new Bah' paradigm.

The Bah' calendar in western countries was synchronized to the Gregorian calendar, meaning that the extra day of a leap year occurs simultaneously in both calendars so there would be 4 intercalary days in most years, and 5 intercalary days during a leap year. The practice in western countries has been to start the year at sunset on March 20, regardless of when the vernal equinox technically occurs. From Naw-Rz 2015. In 2014, the Universal House of Justice selected Tehran, the birthplace of Bah'u'llh, as the location to which the date of the vernal equinox is to be fixed, thereby "unlocking" the Bad' calendar from the Gregorian calendar. For determining the dates, astronomical tables from reliable sources are used. In the same message the Universal House of Justice decided that the birthdays of the Bb and Bah'u'llh will be celebrated on "the first and the second day following the occurrence of the eighth new moon after Naw-Rz" (also with the use of astronomical tables) and fixed the dates of the Bah' Holy Days in the Bah' calendar, standardizing dates for Bah's worldwide. These changes will come into effect as of sunset on 20 March 2015.

The Bah' calendar is composed of 19 months, each with 19 days.[2] The Nineteen Day Fast is held during the final month of Al (2 March 20 March), and is preceded by the intercalary days, known as Ayym-i-H. There are four intercalary days in a regular year, and five in a leap year.[16] The introduction of intercalation marked an important break from Islam, as under the Islamic calendar the practice of intercalation had been specifically prohibited in the Qur'an.[4] The month of fasting is followed by Naw-Rz, the new year. Until 2015, the calendar was effectively synchronized with the Gregorian calendar so that Bah' leap years coincide with common era leap years. In addition, the intercalary days include 28 February and 1 March, causing precise synchronization of the 19 months with the Gregorian calendar. After 2015, the number of the intercalary days will be set as needed to ensure that the year ends on the day before the next vernal equinox

. The names of the months were taken by the Bb from the Du'ay-i-Sahar, a Ramadan dawn prayer by Imam Muhammad al-Baqir, the fifth Imam of Twelver Shi'ah Islam.[17][18] These month names are described as describing attributes of God. In the Persian Bayan the Bb divides the months in four groups, of three, four, six and six months respectively.[19] Robin Mirshahi suggests a possible link with four realms described in Bah' cosmology. The days of the month have the same names as the names of the month - the 9th day of the month for example is the same as the 9th month - Asm, or "Names". In the following table, the Gregorian date indicates the first full day of the month. The month begins at sunset of the Gregorian date previous to the one listed, after which time that month's Nineteen Day Feast may be celebrated.

I could outline many areas of increasing cultural and community specificity in addition to those associated with the calendar as outlined above, in the first two decades of the nature and functioning of this new Bah' culture; examples could include, among others: prayer and meditation, attitudes to non-believers in all sorts of categories from homosexuals to people with a variety of disabilities. The teachings insofar as the moral and ethical, spiritual and community parameters are concerned have found a more extensive set of refinements and explanatory frameworks. I leave this to readers with the interest in the now massive articulation of the Bah' teachings, especially available in cyberspace for interested seekers.

Part 1.1.1:

In their motivations and reform activities, these men & women both resembled & diverged from the great pantheon of reformers & missionary people, political evangelists and social activists. The millennial new World Order they envisioned promised world peace, social and economic justice, and a spiritualization of the planet, similar to Christian expectations of the Kingdom of God on Earth. However, Bah conceptions of a new heaven and earth differed from those of other religious and millennial groups, other political and quasi-utopian factions and formations. The differences were found in the delineation of the doctrinal spiritual and social principles contained in the sacred writings of the Bah faith. The process was envisaged as being gradual; the revolution quiet and unobtrusive, at least in some respects, although the deaths of more than 20,000 of its early believers was anything but quiet and unobtrusive. Also, unlike other western groups, efforts to implement these principles were guided first by a centralized middle-eastern leadership represented by Abdul Bah Abbas from 1892-1921 and, then after His death, by His grandson, Shoghi Effendi Rabbani from 1921-1957. After 1957, the centralized leadership was not middle-eastern and, for more than 50 years, that leadership has been elected by the international Bah' community by a process of direct and indirect elections.

Bahs believe that a universal paradigm shift, instigated by Divine Will and already in existence for arguably two centuries, would gradually institute a new gender-equitable global civilization. This civilization would gradually come into being through cooperative human efforts both within the Bah' community and without in which both men and women would play a major role. The story of the last twenty years of the extension of this two-century-long paradigmatic shift, an extension taken in a particular direction of learning and growth, culture and activity, is at the center of this book.

Part 2:

This book is the longest analysis and commentary on the last 20 years of this new Bah' paradigm, a continuation in many ways, a further development, in the overall paradigmatic shift that first took place within messianic Shi'ism, and then within Babism. The particular development of interest here, the especial part of that paradigm-shift, took place as a heterodox and seemingly negligible offshoot of the Shaykhi school of the Ithna-Ashariyyah-sect, of Shi'ah Islam was transformed into a world religion. That transformation took place largely within the conceptual universe of Shi'ism and, then from the 1860s, within the progressive expansion and establishment of the Bah' faith. By 1996 I had been involved with the Bahai Faith in many different ways for more than four decades, and the Bah' Faith had developed a vast international administrative apparatus that extended into at least a 130,000 centers in the world and, perhaps, well over 150,000 localities.

By 1996, too, that two-century-long shift which was centered quintessentially in the persons of Bah'u'llh and the Bab had effloresced in fully legitimate and universally accepted elected institutions for more than 3 decades, or 75 years, depending on just how one defined and described that process of institutionalization of charisma to draw on that erudite sociologist Max Weber. Weber's terminology and his sociology of religion have provided, for me as well as many other Bah's, a useful intellectual matrix for the articulation of this institutionalizing process.

Context 1996 to 2016

THIS BOOK

Part 1:

This book is the longest analysis of the new Bah' culture of learning and growth that is currently available in the Bahai community, although several other books have appeared since this piece of writing first appeared in cyberspace in 2007. Some of those books have devoted part of their content to this new culture of learning. The overarching perspective in this book is a personal one that attempts to answer the question: "where do I fit into this new paradigm?" Readers are left to work out their own response to this question as readers inevitably must, now and in the decades ahead, as this new paradigm has developed and will develop a highly diverse life of its own within the framework already established in the first two decades of its operation: 1996 to 2016. Each Bah' has to work out what form his or her ready, or not-so-ready, embrace of the unfolding guidance of the Plan will take. Each Bah' has to work out what form, what attitude, what ways and means, what particular activities their approach to learning and the cultural attainments of the mind will take in this new paradigm.

The question now, as one prominent Bah' writer put it, is not "if" but "how" each Bah' will engage themselves, will participate, in this new paradigm as the first century of the Bah' Formative Age comes to an end in 2021, and its second century unfolds in the years beyond 2021. I will be nearly 80 in 2021 as this third millennium continues to challenge all of humanity in ways that can now only be dimly envisaged. In 2044 I will 100 and the Bah' Era(BE) will be two centuries into its predicted 1000 year history. The Bah' cycle, and the Revelation proclaimed by Bahullh, will extend over a period of at least five hundred thousand years, such is the Bah' belief, the long range Bah' historical and futuristic perspective.

Part 1.1:

In accordance with the principle of progressive revelation every Manifestation of God must needs vouchsafe to the peoples of His day a measure of divine guidance ampler than any which a preceding and less receptive age could have received or appreciated. For this reason, and not for any superior merit which the Bah Faith may be said to inherently possess, does a number of prophecies bear witness to the unrivaled power and glory with which the Dispensation of Bahullh has been investeda Dispensation the potentialities of which we are but beginning to perceive and the full range of which we can never determine.

The Faith of Bahullh should indeed be regarded, if we wish to be faithful to the tremendous implications of its message, as the culmination of a cycle, the final stage in a series of successive, of preliminary and progressive revelations. These, beginning with Adam and ending with the Bb, have paved the way and anticipated with an ever-increasing emphasis the advent of that Day of Days in which He Who is the Promise of All Ages should be made manifest.

Part 1.2:

To the truths I have mentioned above, part and parcel of Bah' belief, the utterances of Bahullh abundantly testify. A mere reference to the claims which, in vehement language and with compelling power, He Himself has repeatedly advanced cannot but fully demonstrate the character of the Revelation of which He was the chosen bearer. To the words that have streamed from His penthe fountainhead of so impetuous a Revelationwe should, therefore, direct our attention if we wish to obtain a clearer understanding of its importance and meaning. I try to do this in my book, a book which is getting longer as each month of this paradigm advances. This book is in need of a good editor, but it may be some time before such a skilled person is found.

Whether in His assertion of the unprecedented claim He has advanced, or in His allusions to the mysterious forces He has released, whether in such passages as extol the glories of His long-awaited Day, or magnify the station which they who have recognized its hidden virtues will attain, Bahullh and, to an almost equal extent, the Bb and Abdul-Bah, have bequeathed to posterity mines of such inestimable wealth as none of us who belong to this generation can befittingly estimate. Those of us who have lived through the first two decades of this new paradigm have only begun to understand its quickening wind.

Such testimonies found in the Bah' writings, bearing on the themes to which I have referred above, are impregnated with such power and reveal such beauty as only those who are versed in the languages in which they were originally revealed can claim to have sufficiently appreciated. So numerous are these testimonies that a whole volume would be required to be written in order to compile the most outstanding among them. All I can venture to attempt at present is to share with you only such passages as I have been able to glean from His voluminous writings, and the writings of His legitimate successors as I try to come to grips with the implications of this new Bah' culture of learning and growth in the following pages.

THE INTERNET

Section 1:

In drawing on the works of other writers over the last nine years, 2007 to 2015, I should emphasize at the outset of this lengthy read that, by mid-March 2015, when my most recent additions and deletions, my most recent updates and editings of this book had taken place, the internet had come to possess a myriad print and audio-visual resources in connection with this new paradigm. There was also a vast expanse, an immense extension, of primary & secondary resource material that had become available in the last two decades in cyberspace. More than a little emphasis is given in this book, and in this new paradigm, to the internet. Since the mid-1990s, when this paradigm began its life across the thousands of localities where the Bahai community was and is found, this new culture had become a critical means for the growth of a distinctive Bahai ethos of learning. At the same time, the internet had transformed communication on the planet, at least for those with access to the world-wide-web. My book is just one of the seemingly infinite number of resources now available for the 5 to 8 million Bah's, and some of the 100s of millions, indeed billions, of others on the planet who want to know or will want to know more about this new world Faith, & about its unfolding paradigm.

The advanced computational and communications technologies of the world wide web now play a highly varied, and diverse, set of roles in today's global economic, social, cultural, political, and even ecological orders. The new Bah' culture is one of the many cultures that have been transformed due to the internet. Evidence of this exists in technologies used to implement the internationalization, the globalization, of this Bah' culture of learning & growth. The world-wide-web lives in many of the individual & community manifestations of the Bah' culture of learning spread, as it is now, across 1000s of localities--arguably as many as 150 thousand or more---on the planet. The tools that shape this new media and its practices have transnational impacts and profoundly influence the global outreach of the international Bah' community.

The many new media tools in cyberspace provide contexts for local, regional, national, transnational, and global-scale interaction. The academic study and the practical everyday use of the world-wide-web is a truly interdisciplinary undertaking that has no fixed academic home and, by extension, no organized intra-disciplinary, self-regulating value system or ethics. In other words: it has no cohesive philosophical discourse. It is utilized by the Bah' community at all levels in a virtually infinite number of ways. The internet is embedded in the larger societal and cultural, subjective and objective, economic and community structures of lived experience on our planet of 7.3 billion members, the global population as of January 2015. The systems and sequences, patterns and frameworks within which Bah's exist and operate are now deeply connected to the WWW. At the same time, through this embededness, this new digital media, acts back on the social so that its specific capabilities can engender new concepts of both the individual and the social, of the possible and seemingly impossible. I have devoted some of the initial paragraphs of this book to the internet because of the very pervasiveness of cyberspace in today's world, and because of the profound changes it has brought about not only in the Bah' community, but in my own life as I head through the last decade(70 to 80) of late adulthood, as some developmental psychologists call the years from 60 to 80 in the lifespan, and as my writings have begun to acquire a readership across cyberspace now numbering in the millions, something I could scarcely have believed in the opening years of this new paradigm.

Section 2:

The influence of science and technology on the experience and growth of the Bah' community since the middle of the 19th century, as well as the other kinds of communities on the planet, would make a book in itself. The vast expansion of print culture, of communication technology: the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television; of the means of transportation: shipping, the car, the train, the airplane and jet--have, one and all, overcome much of the tyranny of distance that was the reality of human experience until the 19th and 20th centuries. They have transformed human activity and resulted in changes that were and are more profound than any in humanity's preceding history, changes that are, for the most part, little understood by the present generation.

The communication and the communicating subject, the individual, in cyberspace is endowed with a great deal of autonomy in relation to, and over and above, many of the major and dozens of the minor institutions and organizations of communication that exist in the wide-wide-world. The paradigm shift that is the new culture of learning and growth in the Bah' community has taken place at the same time as the paradigm shift in communication. This latter shift has resulted from the internet since at least those mid-1990s. This transformation of communication is, in some ways, a transformation from mass communication to mass self-communication. The autonomy of social actors like myself has increased and, therefore, the power relationships in the Bah' community as well as the larger society have altered. The authority structure in the Bah' community has not altered, but the power relationships certainly have. I do not want to overemphasize this subject, but I would like to comment on it briefly below.

In social science and politics, power and authority have come under analytical scrutiny in the last half century, to say nothing of any scholarhip in the previous century and centuries. My views of power and authority come closest to those of Richard Sennett(1943- ), the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. His books "The Fall of Public Man" and "Authority" published in 1977 and 1980 respectively provide, for me at least, a series of helpful perspectives on the concepts of authority and power. The term authority is often used for power perceived as legitimate within some social structure. Power can be seen as evil or unjust, but the exercise of power is accepted as endemic to humans as social beings. In the corporate environment, power is often expressed as upward or downward. With downward power, a company's superior influences subordinates. When a company exerts upward power, it is the subordinates who influence the decisions of the leader. These are all somewhat conventional views. Richard Sennett writes with a gentleness rare in academically-styled prophets with a tone indeed as well as a conviction like Toquevilles own. Readers here with the interest might like to have a look at this French historian and sociologist who wrote a two volume work on Democracy in America when Bah'u'llh was in his teens and twenties, the 1830s and early 1840s.

Sennett has embarked upon an extended account over several decades of the current state of affairs in our rapidly globalizing world. His two books which I have mentioned above are the first of several on the subjects of power and authority, and I leave it to readers to further their interests, if interests they have in the complexities of what power and authority actually mean. Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) also wrote two books in his role as French political thinker and historian. He is best known for his works Democracy in America which appeared in two volumes: 1835 and 1840. I leave all this with readers.

Section 3:

It is not my intention to go into the many tributaries of social and political thought, and the many thinkers ancient and modern, whose ideas are relevant to the several contexts that this book explores within the paradigmatic reality of the new Bah' culture. A unity of concept and knowledge has been slowly emerging and a framework, a matrix that organizes thought and gives shape to activities and becomes more elaborate as experience accumulates, has been developing in recent decades. The notion of a framework is central to advancing the work of the Bah' community within this paradigm. Paul Lample expanded on this idea at a recent ABS conference in Canada, in August 2014, and I leave it to readers to Google his remarks, as they Google many a subject in their own efforts to define the ongoing &important relationships between the Bah' Faith and the wider society in which it exists and has its being.

The nature of the altered power relations implicit in the recent communication shift, due to the internet, has possibly four particular features or sources of influence and significance. All of them are complex and all of them will develop lives of their own in the decades ahead. The internet and cyberspace and their several accompanying technologies have several consequences in relation to the power relationships with which I am concerned here. The new mass self-communication provides for people like me: (i) with networking power which is the power to include or exclude entities from my system of communication; (ii) with network power which is the power to set the terms of the interactions that take place within the system through protocols that I define; (iii) with networked power which is the power of enabled social actors over other social actors within the system; and finally, (iv) with network-making power which is the power to shape a system by installing protocols that adhere to my particular goals and values. These ideas are, as I say above, somewhat complex and I hope in the pages which follow to be able to provide a context to assist readers in understanding the concrete manifestations of these abstract ideas. They are also complex and difficult for me to understand. We are all in a new world, a parallel universe, a universe and a world which has been transformed time and time again since the middle of the 19th century.

Section 4:

Letter writing as well as writing prose and poetry across several genres of literature, has taken-on a whole new context and meaning in cyberspace for me after some 50 years of writing letters and essays, prose and poetry, notebooks & books in real space: 1954 to 2004. Since emails and the internet emerged by sensible and insensible degrees in the last two decades, 1994 to 2015, literary communication has been revolutionized. In some ways, this new form of literary exchange is not unlike previous decades and centuries when writing was one of the major forms of communication in society. At least this has become true for some writers like myself who utilize cyberspace as their central medium of publicizing their literary wares: books and ebooks, essays and posts at internet sites, narrative and expository details and accounts.

I could spend all my time now writing emails and posting at internet sites. I could write: (i) short and pithy posts of a line or two; (ii) posts of medium length, say, a paragraph or two, and (iii) long pieces of a page or more. But, since I have other literary interests, since I have reinvented myself in recent years, in the years of this new paradigm---and am now a writer and author, poet and publisher, editor and researcher, online blogger and journalist, reader and scholar, I try to keep the sending of emails and internet posts, these new forms of communication, to a minimum. I spend as little time as possible writing: (a) emails and internet posts, and (b) letters and responses to others in cyberspace. If old friends wonder why I do not send them the short and snappy emails that I used to send to them at their email address, or at their Facebook page, or at some other internet site from, say, in those fin de siecle years of the 1990s and, even more recently in the first years of this 21st century, 2001 to 2009, this is the reason. In 2009 I went on an old-age pension and gradually began to write less and less to the 1000s of people who had come into my internet life. I slowly had to work-out an MO, as they say it in the who-dun-its, or I would spend all my time, 24/7 as they say these days, writing to others in cyberspace.

I elaborate in some detail in the paragraphs below on my new MO, an MO that will take me through my 70s in the years 2014 to 2024, and beyond 2024, if I last that long into my old-age. The explanation I provide here is, in part at least, part of the general articulation of my business plan, of the literary industry, of my cyberspace MO, that has come to occupy my leisure-time, my retirement years, as I head into the evening of my life and its inevitable nightfall, death, that messenger of joy as Bah'u'llh refers to this universal experience. This personal MO is also at the very centre of my own participation in the new Bah' paradigm. Each Bah' must work out their own personal MO, their modus operandi, for participation in the international Bah' community. This book tells much about my way of going about things. My way is not a model for others to emulate. This book has a highly personal context and, as I say many times throughout the book, each Bah' must work how how they will engage in Bah' community life in this new paradigm.

Section 5:

At various times toward the end of those fin de siecle years of the last century, say, 1995 to 1999, human character changed again. At least that is how some social theorists in the fields of sociology and history, psychology and anthropology, have expressed one of the results of all the new technology that has avalaunched into our lives in the last two decades. Human character, at least human interaction, began in those last years of the 20th century to undergo a metamorphosis that is still not complete. But it is profound! It is troubling and challenging for many. For millions, of course, it is irrelevant. This revolutionary change in communication patterns is scarcely understood in its historical context. But, it has become part of the very air we breath, seductively or not-so-seductively insinuating itself into our daily life, we who are connected to some or all of the new technologies. Peoples' responses to this technology are as various as they have been to all technological and human inventions since long before the agricultural, the neolithic, revolution 10,000 years ago which began to transform hunting and gathering communities all over the globe. This book is not an exploration of the internet, nor is it an exploration of the effects of science and technology since the emergence of homo sapiens sapiens. In these opening pages of discussion of this new Bah' paradigm, though, I have provided what I hope readers will find to be a useful, a relevant, context for the new Bah' culture of learning and growth.

When I think about those late 1990s, as I was retiring from the world of paid employment and student life which had occupied me for half a century, 1949 to 1999, it seems like a 100 years ago, another age, another epoch. Whenever that last moment was, before most of us were on the internet and entering the email world, before we had mobile phones and cell phones, smartphones and iphones, that moment and those years seem like the end of another era. A technological paradigm-change has certainly taken-place in the last 20 years, at this climacteric of history as these first years of the 21st century have opened to the world's 7+ billions. Back in those pre-epochal change years of the 20th century, letters came once a day, predictably, in the hands of the postal carrier. News came in three flavors radio, television, print and at appointed hours. Some of us even had a newspaper delivered every morning. For more on this theme, and a stimulating overview of the recent changes in communication patterns, go to: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n16/rebecca-solnit/diary

As Martin Luther King, Jr. and, as many other philosophers and thinkers of prominence have described modern life in different ways: "...all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied together into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality...Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, youve depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured; this is its interrelated quality. We arent going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality and give this reality political and social expression in our institutional life.(Ron Price with thanks to Martin Luther King, Jr)..The new Bah' paradigm has this concept placed squarely at its centre.

THIS BOOK AS A WORK OF ART:

Section 1:

Perhaps as a result of the lingering Symbolist inheritance, an aesthetic notion of most potency in the last 40 years, years since I became an international pioneer from Canada to Australia, and since I began to publish my writing in the various forms of the mass media---and certainly in the context of this new Bah' paradigm---is the idea that a work of art is in some sense about itself. The starting point of the Symbolist movement is the inner vision of the artist. For more, and for a context for this movement, go to: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v06/n11/barbara-everett/somebody-reading

Even in the fine arts, apparently most in love with the visible world, the great painter will be said to paint himself in every portrait. The exquisite old lady reading in a pool of light holds the stillness of Rembrandt himself as he paints, and Velasquez looks back at us through the eyes of a court dwarf. I mention Rembrandt and Velasquez, two very famous artists, but I could just as easily have named any two of literally 100s, indeed, 100s of thousands of others. The artist, the poet, the creative personality, all recreate themselves as they go about their artistic work. So, too, does everyone else in the context of their daily life, although many would not express it that way.

This self-involvement may all the more readily be found in literature since most writers and, perhaps even more, poets tend to be experts on themselves. I write all this since my writing is overtly and explicitly, openly and directly, autobiographical. I am drawing here, in this brief analysis and description, on a book review in the London Review of Books, Vol. 6 No. 11, 21 June 1984 when I was just beginning to be published in the print media and also beginning to write my autobiography at the age of 40. The book review in question was by Barbara Everett. Everett is a British academic and literary critic. Her review is of a book by the famous poetry critic, arguably the most famous and erudite of poetry critics now alive, Helen Vendler. Everett is reviewing The Odes of Keats by Vendler(Harvard, 1984).

Section 2:

This Book as the Current Centerpiece of My Literary Output

A. The programmer or maker of the work, for example this book, in setting the terms of the conversation, can be said to shape the limits of engagement in relation to that work. Both myself and my readers, in turn, exert pressure on the system, the Bah' community. We can strengthen the system, the Bah' community, by using it as the forum for communicating what we are writing & doing, thinking & imagining. But my book, potentially anyway, may also cause a negative input into the general Bah' community. In the case of the new media, the internet, my book can also result in little or no influence or interaction. The digital media we now use are not neutral tools. They enact social, ethical and moral worldviews as this book attempts to do. The work I do as a writer and author is relevant, or so I like to think, so I assume. But what I write must be sensitive to Bah' core values and ethics. Writers like myself need to possess both a disciplinary sense of being self-assured that what they are writing is good work within the intellectual culture that is the Bah' international community. Their work must be underpinned by a strong ethical philosophy that is consistent with (i) the broad framework of the Bah' teachings and (ii) their covenantal relationship with the Cause. At least those are some of the core parameters within which I work and have my literary being. Such, in broad terms, is how I see the wide context for this book on the new Bah' culture.

This book had become, for me, a sort of centerpiece, not only within all the internet posts on the subject, but also within the context of my own writing in these last two decades. Readers wanting to understand this new Bah' culture were not, and are not, short on analyses and commentary if they want to get a picture of what this new Bah' culture was, is, and will be all about. After eight years of having this book in cyberspace this book has become somewhat irrelevant to the mass of readers who prefer, and generally read, only short posts, and for whom a book of this size is just too much in our 21st century world of print and image glut. Millions prefer the short and the pithy, the terse and the taut, the concise and the cryptic, the compact and the clipped to pages and pages of prose. Such is the preference and the proclivity of the Facebook and Twitter generation. That is fine; to each their own as we head into the first decades of this 21st century.

B. As 2015 entered its autumn season, at least in the southern hemisphere,on 21/3/'15, and as spring had begun to open in country after country in the northern hemisphere; as the 50th anniversary of the election of the Universal House of Justice in April 1963 was about to become the 52nd in April 2015 and, as I was myself going through the last half of my 71st year, I found I was adding more and more to this book on a variety of topics that I had no intention of writing about back in 2007 at the inception of this work. There were always several occasions each year when the Universal House of Justice sent further explanatory messages which: (a) extended this new Bahai culture in either its structure and its functioning, or both, and which (b) provided a continuing exegisis for the benefit of a community which was striving to put in place the many dimensions of this new Bahai culture of learning and growth. I was always able, therefore, to add and edit, comment and analyse this new Bah' culture at least several times each year. Who knows where and when this book would find its final edition? I had begun to find, though, as this second decade of the new paradigm was coming to a close, that it was becoming impossible for me to adequately cover all the aspects of this new Bah' paradigm unless I gave to this book virtually all my time. I was not able to do this for several reasons. I began to think that this work was going to become a survey of the first two decades of this new paradigm. By 2016, I frequently thought to myself, I would have to bring closer to a work that had already grown far more than I had anticipated certainly in the first 15 years of this paradigm: 1996 to 2011, the beginning of the current Five Year Plan: 2011 to 2016.

Perhaps my own life would come to an end first, at least it seemed to me that it would in all likelihood end long before this paradigm had completed its continuing and complex delineation, its articulation. At the centre of this paradigm was a community building function that had begun as far back as 1996. The structure of this new Faith, as I have already emphasized, had been slowly defined and described, developed and adumbrated for over a century by 1996, but the community within which that structure was to be articulated, within which it was to live and have its being, required its own timeline. Community building is a slow and difficult process, although it has some simple and quite easy to understand aspects. After two centuries of Babi-Bah' history, the Bah' community has been slowly coming into being all across the planet; little by little and day by day, a long and tedious process in many places, a series as systematic advances, wondrous leaps and thrusts from epoch to epoch, stage to stage, and Plan to Plan in other places. The Bah' community has seen a remarkably dynamic period in which the Bah' community has changed markedly since the mid-1990s, to say nothing of the dynamism that I have witnessed as far back as 1953 when my family in Canada first came into contact with the revolutionizing forces of this Cause. There are many indicators of these changes and these forces, and this work sums them up in what has become a far too lengthy book, far too lengthy for the average member of this Facebook-Twitter generation.

THE BAHA'I WORLD CENTRE

With some 700 people now working at the Bah' World Centre(BWC) in Israel and with 1000s of letters going out each year from various Bah' institutions which operate at the BWC; with over 180 national Bah' communities, some 12,000 to 15,000 locally elected Bah' assemblies; and, as I have already indicated, an estimated 150 thousand localities where 5 to 8 million Bahais reside, the printed matter that now pours out into both the internet and real space is simply staggering. As Paul Lample pointed out at an ABS conference in August of 2014, there are now some 200 clusters in the world where 100 or more individuals are supporting the participation of 1000 or more individuals. The most advanced clusters have 500 people supporting the participation of more than 10,000 people. This book makes no attempt to survey, in even the sketchiest of ways, this Niagara, this avalanche, of text that now flows out over the Bah' world as a result of the complex entity, the vast structure with its myriad functions, that is the new Bah' paradigm. My aim in this now lengthening book is to provide a bird's-eye view, as it is often said, of the big picture. This newest of the world's Abrahamic religions and its culture of learning and growth as it has developed in the last two decades will keep serious readers busy here for some time. You may be advised to skim or scan, if you would like to get just those nuts and bolts which concern you and your personal interests.

THIS BOOK AS A USEFUL RESOURCE TO THE BAHA'I COMMUNITY

This book had become for many, but certainly not for most, a useful resource for readers wanting a macroscopic view of the new Bah' paradigm. As 2015 advanced to 21/4/'15, as the 5th year of the present Plan(2011 to 2016) was about to open, and as the end of the second decade of this new paradigm approached(21/4/'16), I continued to edit a document that had grown to more than 830 pages(font 16). Editing is an endless task, as most serious writers find. Time would tell, given the highly dynamic nature of this new Bah' paradigm, and the extensive growth in the new Bah' culture, just how large a book this piece of writing would become in the remaining months of the current FYP, and the years taking the Bah' community in 2021 to the end of the first century of its Formative Age. There are now 1000s of books in cyberspace, books which best serve as door-stoppers, and are never read by the vast majority of human beings. This is, and will be, I am confident one of these large and bulky books. Cyberspace at least allows readers to take their contents in little chunks, chunks to suit their reading tastes and daily capacities, if it is chunks that are wanted. From my experience of some 20 years now in cyberspace, chunks is all people usually want from the burgeoning books on the internet. As we have moved into this 21st century, the pace of life seems to have accelerated with news coming at us 24/7, dozens of TV and radio stations; indeed, there are now more options for people to spend their leisure time than ever before. Such is the story for those of us in the advanced and developed economies.

What appears to be emerging from the digital revolution is the possibility of a new mode of temporality for public communication, one in which public exchange through the written word can occur without deferral, in a continuously immediate present. It is a world in which we are all, through electronic writing, continuously present to one another, at least to the extent and in whatever ways we desire. This is true for intense and active internet writers like myself, although I am more than a little aware that this is not true of all people. It is not true of millions for whom the parallel universe that is cyberspace virtually does not exist.

Half the world is still not even connected to the internet and its cyberspace. My remarks here are intended to be of some use to that portion of the world for whom the internet is part of their daily bread & butter, so to speak. There is, I would like to suggest, an unprecedented and unpredictable set of qualities that have emerged in recent years; the possibility of the escape of writing from fixity is something that is difficult to grasp. What the digitalization of text seems to have opened up is the possibility for writing to operate in a temporal mode hitherto exclusively possible for speech, as parole rather than langue, (Hesse, 1996: 32), to use expressions from the analysis of language and linguistics. This continuously immediate present of writing allows one's writing projects, and one's conversations around those projects, to develop in a more fruitful, more organic fashion. Such is the case here; such is the way I have come to see this text among my many other writings in cyberspace. To put all this in the context of the new Bah' culture: the paradigmatic shift in the Bah' community has also involved a paradigmatic shift in the way I have gone about writing and publishing, interacting and communicating in the wide-wide-world of the wide-wide-web. This is also true for millions of others and all sorts of permuations and combinations unique to each person but, of course, possessing some patterns followed by millions of others.

THIS BOOK AND THE INTERNET: MORE COMMENTS

Part 1:

This book has many styles of writing

There are now many ways that writing in cyberspace can be described. I have just written a few things in the paragraphs above and readers should not concern themselves if they don't understand some of the ways, some of the words, I have used. The internet is a new medium of communication, like the TV and the radio, the telephone and the telegraph before it. There is now an extensive literature on the subject of the internet and its ways and means of communicating. Each reader will, of course, have their own experience and their own level of interest in this subject. The majority of the 5 to 8 million Bah's will never see this book; for less than half the world had access to the internet as of 2015. I write for a coterie, but so do all writers. Some coteries are big ones and some are little. After some 30,000 to 40,000 hits, I'd say this coterie is in the middle range; it is not likely to go viral, and I will never be either famous or rich, entities which have become somewhat complex in this digital age.

Writers like myself in this document are willing to expose some of the process of editing online as they go about extending their work in cyberspace, in public. This process allows some readers, at least those with the interest who follow the ongoing changes in the text of this now lengthy book, to see some of the bumps and false starts that I have taken along the way, over the last eight years. I didnt at first sense, as I wrote the first edition of this work in cyberspace back in 2007, that I was even embarking on a book-length project; I only knew that I had a small, persistent series of questions that I wanted to think about to some extent. Having formulated an initial stab at some possible answers, and having been disagreed with, as well as supported and encouraged by those who read my work in its first three years online(2007 to 2009), the feedback from my commentators made me think in more complex ways about the issues Id presented. Only then was I able to recognize that there was more to be said, that there was something in the ideas to which I felt compelled to commit myself. Without the simple and highly focused beginnings of this book back in 2007, without those first questions and, by then, by 2007, a decade of thinking about this new Bah' culture, as well as the often inadvertent process of drafting more and more commentary in the public space that is the internet, I would not have been led by sensible and insensible degrees to this longer text, a text that is now, as I say above, 830 pages(font 16). The book has come together bit by bit over the last 96 months.

Approaching my writing from the perspective of process, thinking about how ideas move and develop from one form, one post, one piece of writing to the next, and thinking about the ways that those stages are represented, connected, preserved, and counted within new digital modes of publishing, all helped to foster what has become, for me, a highly fertile text. It may also be far too rambling for many a modern reader. I'm sure it is far too long for most who come across it in cyberspace at whatever site catches their eye, their gaze, their surfing mentality and style, interest inventory and personal circumstances. I took full advantage of the webs particular and very real temporality, its sense of and use of time. A great deal of stuff that appears, that is published, on the web exists, in some sense, in a perpetual draft state, open to future change. Writers therefore, like myself,recognize both the need this creates for careful preservation of the historical record of the stages in a texts life and the equal importance for all authors who utilize this cyberspace mechanism of approaching their work openly, thinking about how their texts might continue to grow even after theyve seen the light of day in some 'published' form. The internet is a new world for both writers and readers. As a writer and teacher over many decades, I am fully aware of how much many find the process of analysis to be like a disease and, with a weary sigh, they often turn to other topics if the analysis goes on too long. Indeed, there are many potentially tortuous considerations which, as a writer, I simply ignore. One can not keep everyone happy all of the time with what one writes. As I often say in this book: I write for a coterie. I, too, often tire of analysis. One can not be on top of everyone's wordy wisdoms or one would exhaust oneself and drown in verbiage.

Part 2:

This Book Has Many Authors

There is a continuously immediate presentin the writing of this book which allows this writing project of mine, and my conversation around this project, to develop in a more fruitful, more organic fashion. This will require a fairly radical shift in both my understanding and that of my readers in what it is I'm doing as I'm writing. If my text is going to continue to grow even as it is being published online, readers are going to need to be present in those texts in order to shepherd that growth perhaps not forever, but certainly for longer than they have been with traditional print publishing. This thought will make many readers and writers nervous, in part because readers and writers already have difficulties with completing a project; if writers like myself have the opportunity to continue working on something forever, well, then what? On the other hand, would that necessarily be such a bad thing? I am freed to shift my attention away from publication as the moment of singularity in which a text transforms from nothing into something, and instead focus on the many important stages in my works coming-into-being.

In fact, all of this helps me as a writer to think of my career as a writer in a more holistic sense, as an ongoing process of development. I am free to take some or many key moments of writing, what some now call 'the moment of complexity', and see them not as a series of discrete closed projects. I can return again and again to the scene of the text in order to make changes as a result of changes in my thinking about something I had once committed to print. Or I can take old material in new directions. In the past this might have seemed somehow vaguely scandalous. Such abilities it seems to me lead to work that is better thought-through, more significant'. But in order to take advantage of these abilities, writers and readers will first have to learn to value process over product, and to manifest that value in the assessments of literary work. This, of course, this emphasis on process over content has been part of the teaching of writing in many western countries for several decades now anyway.

As this text became increasingly available for the sort of ongoing development to which I refer above, I recognized more and more the degree to which I was no longer the sole author working on and in this book. This work became far more collaborative than any book I have written in the past. New modes of collaboration over time, across distances made possible by networked writing structures required me to think about originality quite differently, precisely because of the ways that these new modes intervened in my conventional associations of authorship with individuality, with this work as mine. This was a new world of publishing and it was a new Bah' culture as the fin de siecle closed and the first years of the 21st century advanced incrementally---and as I retired from FT, PT and most volunteer work that had kept me busy for half a century.

The two facets of conventional authorship, individuality and originality, are intertwined in complex and subtle ways: insisting that a text must consist of ones own work is to insist that it make an original contribution to the field. The bottom-line, as they say these days, is that one's work is not simply one's own, not uniquely one's own. Not only does the operation of the digital network exclude the possibility of uniqueness in its very function, the links and interconnections that the network facilitates profoundly affect the shape of any given text. In digital scholarship, the relationships between the authors whose ideas we draw upon, and the texts that we produce are highly dynamic. The work of some of our predecessors is, in some sense, contained within whatever increasingly fuzzy boundaries draw the outlines of my use of texts. And so it is that readers may find this work somewhat fuzzy and not to their liking. It will be too long a read, as I say above, for many but, "such is life" as the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly is reported to have said on his way to the gallows in NSW in 1880.

Part 3:

This New Bah' Culture Has Many Commentators

Since 1996, the year that this new Bah' culture of learning and growth had its inception, there has been a wealth of new literature, both primary and secondary. I make no attempt to survey this vast landscape. I will cut-and-paste below a review of two books which throw some light on aspects of Bah' culture which I have given little discussion of, important aspects, from my point of view. The two books also came out right at the start of this new Bah' paradigm, although the reviews did not appear until the third year of the new paradigm. The two books are: (1) Symbol and Secret and (2) Revisioning the Sacred. The reviews are both by Jonah Winters and they were published in Iranian Studies, Vol 32, No.1, pages 141-145 in 1999. I had just retired from a 50 year student and employment life in 1999 and was beginning the reinvention of myself as a writer and author, poet and publisher, editor and researcher, reader and scholar, online blogger and journalist.

Symbol and Secret: Qur'n Commentary in Bah'u'llh's Kitab-i qn appeared in Studies in t