Sunday, July 29, 2007

Dogma

Dogma, Baha'i Dogma and Intuition

By John Taylor; 2007 July 29

For those on the Badi' buddy list, as opposed to the Badi' Blog, you may be interested to read the following comment added to my recent essay on changes in the Ontario electoral process:

New comment on your post "Electoral Reform," posted by Anonymous to Badi’ Blog at 10:26 PM, July 26, 2007:

"Hello there, I am very pleased that you came across that brochure. I am one of the 103 persons selected and thought I would answer your query regarding the vote. Yes, you will be able to vote for just the person or just the party or both. It will not spoil the ballot if you only fill out half the ballot. Hope this helps."

This correspondent is evidently not a Baha'i and heard about my comments through Google Alert, which picks up on a keyword like "Electoral" or "Reform." So, we can assume that when the time comes the National Spiritual Assembly of Canada will be suggesting to Baha'is that in order to remain apolitical we should only fill out the half of our ballots voting for an individual, as opposed to the half choosing a political party.

Life since my health improved has been busy to the point of hectic, but sometimes a day comes together with enough coherence that I cannot ignore it and I must make it into an essay, in spite of my determination to concentrate only on what will most benefit the human race. This is especially true in a relapse, like now. I have had two close brushes with migraine in the past five days. The day when it all fell together was this Friday, just after migraine number one.

Much of Friday afternoon I listened to an audio book called "The Wisdom of Your Cells," by a maverick biologist called Bruce Lipton. He disagrees sharply with the majority opinion of his colleagues, who are notoriously atheistic, die-hard materialists. They hold to what James Crick called the "central dogma," that cells are machines run by their genome, and that is that. Genetic determinism is the result. Whatever the dogma's merits in seeking truth, this extreme reductionism has proven to be a lucrative grant magnet for working researchers. Presently biology is the best funded of all sciences, having surpassed physics over a decade ago. Lipton, on his website, holds that a new biology is needed to replace the old,

"This new biology takes us from the belief that we are victims of our genes, that we are biochemical machines, that life is out of our control, into another reality, a reality where our thoughts, beliefs and mind control our genes, our behavior and the life we experience. This biology is based on current, modern science with some new perceptions added." (http://www.brucelipton.com/)

Although I avoid trendy New Age pap (mockingly misnamed by its opponents, "New Wage," reflecting how lucrative it is to mix science and faith), this guy seems to be a legitimate researcher. Researching the cell first hand, he realized that genes do not act like they are supposed to. He observed that you can de-nucleate a cell and it will live and reproduce for hundreds of generations, with no genetic material at all. He found that, contrary to received opinion, the "brain" of the cell is not its nucleus with its vaunted genome, but the outer membrane; the latter functions exactly like a computer chip, calculating stimuli and responding to its surrounding cells. He researched quantum mechanics and saw that biology was, in terms of physics, stuck back in the mechanistic Newtonian model and was ignoring the new quantum physics paradigm. Quantum mechanics allows this membrane to function like a radio receiver, and acts like a member of a community of trillions of other cells that make up the human body.

I especially liked his realization of how ideological his discipline is when he did a double take on Crick's "central dogma" saying. He looked up the definition of the word "dogma," and found something like this definition:

"Dogma: A doctrine or a corpus of doctrines relating to matters such as morality and faith, set forth in an authoritative manner by a church. An authoritative principle, belief, or statement of ideas or opinion, especially one considered to be absolutely true." (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language)

Biologists are deeply committed to a central mechanistic dogma. The very word dogma, then, implies that this conviction is outside science, it is inherently religious -- or, to speak more exactly, anti-religious. The central dogma of biology does not necessarily have any relation with the facts staring biologists in the face, Lipton realized.

This made me think about why we Baha'is avoid the word "dogma," in spite of the fact that we hold many truths sacred and untouchable. Perhaps we eschew the word because, unlike certain pre-Islamic religions, we believe in the harmony of science and religion. Nothing is "absolutely true," we believe in the relativity of religious truth. A dogma, on the other hand, according to the Wikipedia definition, is an,

"established belief or doctrine ... thought to be authoritative and not to be disputed or doubted. While in the context of religion the term is largely descriptive, outside of religion its current usage tends to carry a pejorative connotation referring to concepts as being `established' only according to a particular point of view, and thus one of doubtful foundation."

Thus materialist biologists could not object to the spiritual viewpoint of Bruce Lipton without themselves invoking a dogmatic, non-scientific set of beliefs -- a matter of the pot calling the kettle black, and then hypocritically denying that it has any color at all. Wiki then quotes the great apologist of Christianity, St. Thomas Aquinas:

"If our opponent believes nothing of divine revelation, there is no longer any means of proving the articles of faith by reasoning, but only of answering his objections if he has any against faith."

In this Thomist sense, then, I think there is such a thing as Baha'i dogma. Certainly our belief in the Covenant is as close as you can get to a dogma; certainly, if a person accepts Baha'i beliefs in every way but rejects the covenant, they are not a Baha'i, or even a believer in God. This, I think, is what the Tablet of Ahmad was written in order to establish. First it identifies adherence to the dogma or teaching of the Bab and Baha'u'llah as identical with adherence to God, "O people, if ye deny these verses, by what proof have ye believed in God?" and then, at its climax, it goes a step further by upholding the same identity in regard to the Person of Baha'u'llah, the Ancient Beauty, and God, as well as with the earlier Manifestations of God,

"Be thou assured in thyself that verily, he who turns away from this Beauty hath also turned away from the Messengers of the past and showeth pride towards God from all eternity to all eternity."

If that is not an "established belief or doctrine," I do not know what it is. Since a covenant denier has denied the basis of revelation, as Aquinas says, the only kind of discussion possible would be about their objections to faith. Any other digression would undermine our own faith.

But I digress myself. I was talking about the central dogma of biology. I listened, as I say, to Lipton’s ideas that the unity in our body, even our decisions, can directly affect our health. He even holds that it is the false theory of genetic super-power that has made iatrogenic illness the leading cause of death. This is no idle academic squabble, millions are being killed by this dogma every day (now that I think of it, the same could be said about denial of the Baha’i covenant). No, Lipton says, cells are like little radar stations responding to the condition of the overall organism. We need to tune in.

Having had my cup of Lipton to overflowing, I went for a break to Video Tonite to get a film. I found myself attracted to a new release called “Premonition.” Reading the blurb I found that it stars the only star I love and admire unreservedly enough to watch just because she is in it, Sandra Bullock. Plus, the premise sounded intriguing. A woman gets news of the death of her husband and then wakes up next morning with him alive, getting ready for work. The DVD includes two short films about the real precognition and premonition (there is a difference, it seems) events that inspired this fictional story. One fellow had a premonition of a plane crash decades ago, and breaks into tears in the retelling, he is still so tortured by his helplessness knowing what will happen yet not being able to help the crash victims.

The film, though complex and confusing at times, was very good, just the kind of food for thought that I like sometimes. Then, for bedtime reading, I started to read Ramona Allen Brown’s memoir of the early days of the Baha’i Faith in California, “Memories of Abdu’l-Baha.” She, as a young Baha’i, gained about the greatest honor you can imagine, she was a friend of Lua Getsinger. The greatest thing I have got out of this memoir so far is the insights it gives into Lua’s character. I had forgotten how soon Lua died, 1916. That changes how I look at that momentous experience she had with the Master and Juliet Thompson, when the Master pointed to Lua and told her to go proclaim that He was the Center of the Covenant. At the time there was great confusion as whether He was the return of Christ, or what? Through her, we learned a new term, center of the covenant. Anyways, in California Lua and Ramona together practiced a unique form of what I believe is called bibliomancy.

“Lua and I became very good friends, and she called me her “little Persian sister.” I often visited her in her hotel in San Francisco. Many times we were together, teaching problems would arise, and decisions would have to be made. I remember once when Lua was asked to speak in a city south of San Francisco, and the question arose as to whether to spend the money for the trip or buy a pair of shoes for a very needy Baha’i. We considered the question and prayed sincerely while holding a volume of my book, “Tablets of Abdu’l-Baha,” which I then opened for guidance. The decision was reached that the shoes were to be bought.” (Memories, p. 13)

Another time they had to choose which city to teach in, San Francisco or Palo Alto, and she opened the book and read “The path has been cleared, the way opened for her.” That decided them on Palo Alto, which the Master later visited personally. They later mentioned their bibliomancy to the Master, and His reaction was different from what I would have expected, considering the troubles he had in America with the occult and other superstitions. He smiled at Ramona and said,

“You have intuition. You must follow it always, because when you follow it, it increases and becomes more clear. Only a few have this gift. It is like the tinkling of bells, a sixth sense, like the voice of God speaking. The more one follows intuition, the more it increases.” (Ibid. p. 14)

Having just read how the latest discoveries indicate that the cell is more of a radio transmission beacon than a mechanical clock, and have just seen a film showing how time for some is not as linear, fixed, cut and dried as we in our right minds usually think, this came to me as something of a revelation. If only I got some sort of intuition like that! True, I could not very well deny the guidance that gave me the insights of this freaky Friday in the first place, and I do seem in some of my essays to be guided from idea to idea with the blind luck of a Mr. Magoo, but how much more impressive it would be to say to somebody, “Do not take that trip, you will be killed in an accident if you do.” Another freaky thing about that film was the fact that Sandra Bullock’s character’s husband is beheaded in a traffic accident, just like my brother Tommy was in his fatal car/train accident. That freaked me out a little too. Anyways, maybe I should put a hard copy of that book, Tablets of Abdu’l-Baha, onto the top of my “books to buy” list, especially in view of the following,

“Lua asked the Master if I might use the book for guidance in the future. Smiling at me, He said, `Yes.’ Then He took my book, opened it, and, resting it on the palm of His left hand, wrote His name on it.” (Id.)

The book “Tablets of Abdu’l-Baha” has been out of print for a good eighty years, so it may not be so easy to get a hold of a copy. As a compromise, I thought of an alternative that in some ways might be even better. Somebody should take the electronic text of TAB and make up one of those “quote-a-day” servers on the Web. That way you could choose the method, either random or chronological, and have a Tablet sent to your email box every day. That way, even if the selection you get does not work from a “bibliomancical” perspective, at least you would get a little insight into what it must have been like for the early believers, who could and did write the Master with their problems, and whose only Baha’i scripture was a handwritten copy of these letters from Abdu’l-Baha.

 

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