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Path Toward Peace - Step Ten
By Alexander M Zoltai
(Link for previous post in this series) Two Wings of Progress: Material Achievements and Spiritual Perfections Ever wondered why, if we’re such brainy and advanced creatures, we have so many critical crises going on? Ever pondered how spiritual solutions to those crises could resolve even the material factors? What’s wrong with the quote in the following news item? From The Moultrie Observer: An Energy Overview: “A U.S. declaration of energy independence to be achieved in the next decade can develop the ‘know how’ to reconstitute the basis for our material civilization. This would replace the now skeletal wealth-generating engines of the smoke-staked industrial age with means of many magnitudes greater productive and wealth-building potential.” The first thing wrong with that quote is the idea of U.S. energy independence. When will the leaders get it right? We live in an interdependent world. Anything based on nationalistic independence will fail and, in the process, harm others in the Human Family. The other thing wrong with the quote is the article it’s in: a careful analysis of the “solution” to a failed factor in the equation of material civilization. There is no mention of spiritual values. The only word even coming close is “ideal” and it indicates a material use of brain-power directed toward a material solution for a material world… There is no doubt that we live in a material world. There is also no doubt that the proponents of strict material solutions for the crises of our world have completely failed to resolve those crises and daily add to the confusion and suffering of our Family. Material civilization has contributed many wonderful and positively helpful products and processes to our struggle as spiritual entities with material bodies living on the Earth. The issue is the continuing and disturbing failure to recognize the spiritual side of the equation… Spiritual Quotes: “Wert thou to attain to but a dewdrop of the crystal waters of divine knowledge, thou wouldst readily realize that true life is not the life of the flesh but the life of the spirit. For the life of the flesh is common to both men and animals, whereas the life of the spirit is possessed only by the pure in heart who have quaffed from the ocean of faith and partaken of the fruit of certitude. This life knoweth no death, and this existence is crowned by immortality. Even as it hath been said: ‘He who is a true believer liveth both in this world and in the world to come.’ If by ‘life’ be meant this earthly life, it is evident that death must needs overtake it.”
Bahá’u’lláh, The Kitab-i-Iqan, p. 120 “A superficial culture, unsupported by a cultivated morality, is as ‘a confused medley of dreams’,[1] and external lustre without inner perfection is ‘like a vapor in the desert which the thirsty dreameth to be water’.[2] For results which would win the good pleasure of God and secure the peace and well-being of man, could never be fully achieved in a merely external civilization…. “Be just: can this nominal civilization, unsupported by a genuine civilization of character, bring about the peace and well-being of the people or win the good pleasure of God? Does it not, rather, connote the destruction of man’s estate and pull down the pillars of happiness and peace?”
[1 Qur'án 12:44; 21:5.]
[2 Qur'án 24:39.]
‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Secret of Divine Civilization, pp. 60-62 (Read the next post in this series)
This intel first appeared on: http://amzuri.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/path-toward-peace-step-ten/
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