Purity and Happiness

Purity and Happiness

By John Taylor; 4 August, 2005

The wisest philosophers have always recognized that happiness in this
world is impossible because nobody can agree upon what it is.
Happiness for one can be punishment for another. All we can hope is to
do our best to be worthy of happiness, as Hamlet said, "The readiness
is all," and then hope that Life's Summum Bonum will result, either
here or in the next life. Although we cannot be certain of happiness
we do tend to have firm idea of what it is not. That is, we can reject
and expunge all things that are abhorrent and that act as blocks to
human happiness. `Abdu'l-Baha gave this advice:

"You must cling to those things which prove to be the cause of
happiness for the world of man. You must show kindness to the orphans,
give food to the hungry, clothe the naked and offer help to the poor
so that you may be accepted in the Court of God." (quoted in,
Mahmoud's Diary, 247)

In light of this, let us sum up our thesis on work and wealth as
pillars of happiness so far:

Freedom from property pollution is essential to well-being and
happiness. The Bab's teaching in the Persian Bayan on purity is
fulfilled in the Baha'i laws of work as worship and of Huqquq. This
new foundation of financial relationships will remove the corruption
that ends in degradation of the planet's natural environment, along
with all other outer signs of violence, ugliness and impurity.

Today let us look at what the Bab has to say about purity in the last
section of the Persian Bayan translated into English. The Bab begins
by underlining the central importance of this process,

"Know thou that in the Bayan purification is regarded as the most
acceptable means for attaining nearness unto God and as the most
meritorious of all deeds." (Bab, Selections, 98)

In terms of this world, purification tends to be seen as a negative,
but the reality is quite the reverse. In religion the story is
prototypical, always the same. The Manifestation is reviled and
persecuted viciously in His lifetime but after generations His Truth
wins out.

Even the eyes and nerves of the body depend upon purification. I read
recently that most of the substantial amount of energy the body
invests in perception and reflex reactions is used up in cleaning and
resetting the tubes and synapses of nerves and neurons. Without
continual chemical purging of the synapses we would never feel more
than one sensation or see more than one image. Thus our very mind and
perception depend from one moment to the next upon assiduous
biochemical purification.

In every area of human endeavor the toughest jobs are always the real
cleanup jobs. Try to clean up language and you make yourself into
either a prude or a tyrannical censor. Try to keep a clean household
and you are an anal, unimaginative drudge. Try to keep your thoughts
free from commercials and bought thoughts and you are out of touch,
yesterday's child. Try cleaning up governance and you make a thousand
well placed enemies.

Yet purification must be done, in politics most urgently of all.
Reformers in Finland, Europe's most spectacular high-tech success
story in the past decade or two, were reviled for distributing money
to the most effective high technology ventures based solely upon
anticipated need, rather than patronage or influence. But because they
stood fast and ignored the pressure to butter the palms of well placed
persons and did only what had to be done, that nation has shot ahead
of its neighbors and is now ranked as the most productive economy in
the world.

The Bab continues, touching upon every area that has to be cleaned,
starting from perception of externals, proceeding inward and ending in
daily deeds,

"Thus purge thou thine ear that thou mayest hear no mention besides
God, and purge thine eye that it behold naught except God, and thy
conscience that it perceive naught other than God, and thy tongue that
it proclaim nothing but God, and thy hand to write naught but the
words of God, and thy knowledge that it comprehend naught except God,
and thy heart that it entertain no wish save God, and in like manner
purge all thine acts and thy pursuits that thou mayest be nurtured in
the paradise of pure love, and perchance mayest attain the presence of
Him Whom God shall make manifest, adorned with a purity which He
highly cherisheth, and be sanctified from whosoever hath turned away
from Him and doth not support Him. Thus shalt thou manifest a purity
that shall profit thee." (Ib.)

So the Bab is saying that what is past is prologue; our lives and
struggles in life are nothing but washing up in order to enter clean
and clear into the presence of the Manifest One, where we hope to be
"nurtured in the paradise of pure love." We will never be worthy to be
in that Presence, but to be pure is to be as He created us, and that
has to be acceptable, we hope.

This paragraph of the Bab summons up in my mind a wonderful, panoramic
vision of the media soon to be invented. Only in the past year or so
is this a possibility, with the development of the Internet's new
"blogosphere" and audio-on-demand and video-on-demand capabilities.
Thus, the Bab asserts that the only profitable purity is: purged
hearing (audio), a purged eye (video), purged speech (universal
participation in personal blogging), purged conscience (the
self-censor of daily personal assessment), purged writing (open,
dynamic, hypertext "Wiki" texts), and purged knowledge (college papers
are already being reliably marked by intelligent computer programs),
as well as purged wishes and purged acts, all of which will be
conditioned by purification of minds running, rather than being
exploited by, the electronic media. If we put purification first, the
new media-on-demand holds wonderful promise.

But before this great purging of the human mind, individually and
together, can come to full fruition we must pay attention to the
Master's advice at the beginning of this essay, that we have a moral
duty to purge the grossest blocks to the totality of human happiness
first. Otherwise our cleaning efforts will be as futile as dusting the
knickknacks in a house being overwhelmed by a flood. The remaining
essays in this series will be concerned with how we might go about
this Most Great Purification of the gross obstacles to human
happiness.

--
John Taylor

badijet@gmail.com