Change Your Mind :: Baha'i Perspectives

Change Your Mind

iman April 17th, 2009

Integration-Disintegration

I woke up with a thought in my mind: why do I sometimes resist change; character improvement for the better? It’s simply easier to stay the same, I guess, even if it’s not always comfortable. Sometimes it may be because we are too comfortable that we don’t feel the urge to adjust ourselves. Sometimes we just don’t realize that we need to change. Realization occurs only after careful and constant reflection on our actions; but sometimes we don’t reflect and don’t try to change. In truth, however, it isn’t easy to disregard all past habits and experiences and start anew. Abdu’l-Baha says:

It is extremely difficult to teach the individual and refine his character once puberty is passed. By then, as experience hath shown, even if every effort be exerted to modify some tendency of his, it all availeth nothing. He may, perhaps, improve somewhat today; but let a few days pass and he forgetteth, and turneth backward to his habitual condition and accustomed ways.

Therefore it is in early childhood that a firm foundation must be laid:

It followeth that the children’s school must be a place of utmost discipline and order, that instruction must be thorough, and provision must be made for the rectification and refinement of character; so that, in his earliest years, within the very essence of the child, the divine foundation will be laid and the structure of holiness raised up…Know that this matter of instruction, of character rectification and refinement, of heartening and encouraging the child, is of the utmost importance, for such are basic principles of God.

Hardship and tests can act as a catalyst for change, not only on a personal level but also on a global one. Mankind as an entity faces challenges similar to those restraining us in our journey of personal transformation. It seems to be the common case, globally, that change is resisted. It seems as though only until our ‘backs are against the wall’ that we begin to discern the importance of altering our unsustainable patterns of old.

How long will humanity persist in its waywardness? How long will injustice continue? How long is chaos and confusion to reign amongst men? How long will discord agitate the face of society?…The signs of impending convulsions and chaos can now be discerned, inasmuch as the prevailing order appeareth to be lamentably defective.

(Baha’u'llah, Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u'llah, p. 215)

Shoghi Effendi goes on to say:

Economic distress…together with political confusion, financial upheavals, religious restlessness and racial animosities, seem to have conspired to add immeasurably to the burdens under which an impoverished, a war-weary world is groaning…The world…is everywhere assailed by forces it can neither explain nor control.

That the forces of a world catastrophe can alone precipitate such a new phase of human thought is, alas, becoming increasingly apparent. That nothing short of the fire of a severe ordeal, unparalleled in its intensity, can fuse and weld the discordant entities that constitute the elements of present-day civilization, into the integral components of the world commonwealth of the future, is a truth which future events will increasingly demonstrate.

Does this imply that dire times lie ahead?

Nothing but a fiery ordeal, out of which humanity will emerge, chastened and prepared, can succeed in implanting that sense of responsibility which the leaders of a new-born age must arise to shoulder.

(Shoghi Effendi, The World Order of Baha’u'llah, p. 45)

Drawing on Ohm’s law, the more the resistance experienced, the greater the potential. The onus is on us to make use of this potential.