I’ve launched a new blog called The Metaphysician. . I’ve billed it as explorations of our humanness, inspired by this quotation from Shoghi Effendi:

What the Bah?’?s do believ is that we have three aspects to our humannes, so to speak, a body, a mind and in immortal identity - soul or spirit. We believ the mind forms a link between the soul and the body, and the two interact with each other.

This blog may well take time to grow, but I hope others may assist with this exploration.

I’ve put up a very simple home page, from which you can reach both my blogs. I will add to it when I have time, but it will take time…

I’ve called it A Glimpsed Reality. Why not Barney’s World or something equally naff? Well, I know that I only catch glimpses of my reality out of the corner of my eye from time to time - only when it vouchsafes itself to me when I’m praying, reading the Writings or meditating.

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It seems that regular meditation will not only give you more energy and concentration, but it will give you a bigger brain too. All of the above I need desperately.

A New Scientist article from last November (why I have I only just got to this - ah, I know, I need the bigger brain to cope with the flood of information that I have to deal with daily) reports on two research projects:

Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better ? and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.

People who meditate say the practice restores their energy, and some claim they need less sleep as a result. Many studies have reported that the brain works differently during meditation ? brainwave patterns change and neuronal firing patterns synchronise. But whether meditation actually brings any of the restorative benefits of sleep has remained largely unexplored.

So Bruce O?Hara and colleagues at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, US, decided to investigate. They used a well-established ?psychomotor vigilance task?, which has long been used to quantify the effects of sleepiness on mental acuity. The test involves staring at an LCD screen and pressing a button as soon as an image pops up. Typically, people take 200 to 300 milliseconds to respond, but sleep-deprived people take much longer, and sometimes miss the stimulus altogether.

Ten volunteers were tested before and after 40 minutes of either sleep, meditation, reading or light conversation, with all subjects trying all conditions. The 40-minute nap was known to improve performance (after an hour or so to recover from grogginess). But what astonished the researchers was that meditation was the only intervention that immediately led to superior performance, despite none of the volunteers being experienced at meditation.

?Every single subject showed improvement,? says O?Hara. The improvement was even more dramatic after a night without sleep. But, he admits: ?Why it improves performance, we do not know.? The team is now studying experienced meditators, who spend several hours each day in practice.

Brain builder

What effect meditating has on the structure of the brain has also been a matter of some debate. Now Sara Lazar at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, US, and colleagues have used MRI to compare 15 meditators, with experience ranging from 1 to 30 years, and 15 non-meditators.

They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.

?You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger,? she says. The finding is in line with studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence, says Lazar, that yogis ?aren?t just sitting there doing nothing”.

The growth of the cortex is not due to the growth of new neurons, she points out, but results from wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and connections.

Not only that, but:

God can help you relax, according to a study of meditation. People practising spiritual meditation were more relaxed and better able to withstand pain than those performing secular meditation.

College students who volunteered for the study were randomly assigned to one of three groups regardless of their spiritual beliefs. The 25 students in the spiritual meditation group were told to concentrate on a phrase such as “God is love” or “God is peace” during their meditation periods. Those in the secular meditation group used a phrase such as “I am happy” or “I am joyful” while the third group were simply told to relax.

This is from another New Scientist article. Unfortunately this is premium content and I am much too mean to pay for the whole article. It’s intriguing, tho’. I’ll have to take more time to say my 95 ‘All?h’u'Abh?’s’.

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Have you ever wondered what a mullocratic chiliast is? No, nor had I until I read an op-ed piece from yesterday by William F Buckley Jr about Iran’s nuclear games. Buckley uses the term as (presumably) a term of abuse about Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

‘Mullocratic’ I am sure you can get. But you might want to read the Wikipedia article on chiliasm to get a handle on what this means. Interestingly the article refers to Christian and Zoroastrian chiliasm, but not to Islamic (specifically Shi’ite Islamic) chiliasm.

The pre-history and early history of the Bah?’? Faith is inextricably tied up with Shi’ite chiliasm. When the B?b stood in Mecca and proclaimed Himself to be the Q?’im, the return of the Twelfth Imam (aka the Hidden Imam or the Imam Mahdi), whose advent faithful Shi’a Muslims had been awaiting for a thousand years, His fate was sealed and the attitude of the Shi’ite clergy towards the Bah?’? Faith determined.

Here’s an excerpt from the article on the Baha’i World website:

The next step was publicly to proclaim the new faith. This began with a visit by the B?b to the center of pilgrimage for the Muslim world, the twin cities of Mecca and Medina in Arabia. On Friday, December 20, 1844, standing with His hand on the door-ring of the Kaaba, the holiest shrine in all the Islamic world, the B?b publicly declared: “I am that Qa’im Whose advent you have been waiting.” He also addressed a special “tablet,” or letter, to the Sharif of Mecca, guardian of the shrines, in which He made the same claim. On neither occasion, although He was treated with great respect, was any serious attention given to His claims by the authorities of Sunni Islam. Undeterred, the B?b set sail for Persia, where the teaching activities of the Letters of the Living were beginning to raise a storm of excitement among both the clergy and the general public.

To the Shiah Muslim clergy, the claims made by the B?b were not merely heretical, but a threat to the foundations of Islam. Orthodox Islam holds that Muhammad was the “Seal of the Prophets” and thus the bearer of God’s final revelation to humankind until the “Day of Judgment.” Only Islam has remained pure and undiminished because its repository, the Qur’an, represents the authentic words uttered by the Prophet himself. From this baseline, Muslim theology had gone on to assert that Islam contains all that humanity will ever need until the Day of Judgement and that no further revelation of the divine purpose could or would occur.

The B?b’s declaration of His mission was, therefore, a challenge to the central pillar of this theological system. For the Shiah, the dominant branch of Islam in Persia, the challenge was especially acute. Over the centuries, Shiah dogma had accorded unlimited authority over all human affairs to the person of the “Hidden Imam,” whose advent was to signal the Judgment Day. Indeed, it had been argued that the shahs themselves reigned merely as the Imam’s trustees. Accordingly, throughout Persia, mullas arose in violent opposition to the B?b almost as soon as they heard His claim. This opposition was greatly intensified by the B?b’s denunciation of the prevailing ignorance and degeneracy of the clergy, which He saw as the principal obstacle to the progress of the Persian people.

It’s well worth reading the whole article.

Ahmadinejad’s devotion to the Twelfth Imam has been well documented in the media. This article by John von Heyking sets out some of the issues that arise, particularly for western governments. The article mentions Ahmadinejad’s possible membership of the Hojjatieh Society, an organization who believe they can hasten the return of the Hojjat or Twelfth Imam by creating chaos in the world. However, the article fails to mention that the Hojjatieh was established in 1953 with the specifically anti-Bah?’? agenda. To discuss Shi’a chiliasm in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries without reference to the B?b? and Bah?’? Faiths is, in my view, a serious omission, since both the B?b and Bah?’u'll?h explicitly connect their Revelations with the millennial doctrines of Shi’ism and the expected return of the Hidden Imam. (It is important to understand, by the way, that the B?b did not claim to be the physical return of the Hidden Imam. The Bah?’? teachings see the ‘return’ of God’s Messengers as a spiritually archetypal and symbolic reality, but not as somehow - and impossibly -physical.

I’m afraid that Ahmadinejad’s chiliastic devotion does not bode well for the followers of Bah?’u'll?h in Iran.

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I have put a pdf of the NewStatesman’s comparisons of different religions here. I’d be interested to know what you think about it.

This special issue of NewStatesman magazine is about religion in the modern world. It is well worth reading, if only to see what a range of people think and believe about religion and its place in life.

The special issue includes a comparison of the origins, beliefs and practices of the world’s major belief systems - amongst them the Baha’i Faith. Baha’is may be shocked to see the picture that accompanies the Baha’i section of this comparison. Time for a day, if not of rage, of moderate annoyance?

Unfortunately, you need a subscription to read more than one of the articles!

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