Captive by Design
nava July 28th, 2009
Two people. A giant maze filled with splendors and horrors. The objective: make their way through it learning as much about it and themselves as they can along the way.
Person A walks around this maze with his eyes wide open. He sees the fire and knows to steer away from it. He sees the pot hole and knows to walk around it. He smells the roses but spots the thorns and knows not to lean in too closely. But the maze is also lined with gentle streams and giant waterfalls. Beautiful gardens and delectable delicacies. With all of his senses fully awakened, he partakes of its benefits as he makes his way through its many corridors. Making his way through it isn’t easy. Some bends are harder to come out of. Some elements are harder to easily identify as “splendor” or “horror. Yet, with eyes wide open, he is usually able to steer carefully away from the dangerous elements so often comingling with the beneficent ones.
Person B person walks around the maze with a giant blindfold over her eyes. Encouraged by the warmth she approaches the source; the flames spread too quickly for her to turn around unscathed. She didn’t realize it was fire. She manages to run away, skin raw and throbbing, only to fall directly into the pot hole. She breaks a leg but still manages to climb out. Her olfactory draws her near to the beautiful aroma emanating from the roses; she follows the scent, and before she knows it, her face is covered in thorns. In the meanwhile, the gentle streams and thornless flowers are all lost on her. She hears the roaring of the waterfall but is much too scared to approach it. She spends all her days wandering aimlessly through the maze, completely oblivious to all the beauty it has to offer, accruing little more than scars.
Bahá’u’lláh likens His laws to the lamps of His loving-providence. His laws guide us in this complex world so full of beauty and so follow of sorrow. We know that true freedom comes from submission to His will; obedience to His laws. It sounds pretty counter-intuitive doesn’t it? That freedom comes from willful obedience. But then you think about life. The fact that we’ve all been created for the same purpose. The fact that we all live in the same world and we all experience tests, often rather violent tests. Though the specific form of our tests may differ, the underlying purpose of them is the same. The main difference is that some of us live in this world with our eyes wide open. Certainly, we don’t always know which way to go, sometimes we just can’t seem to sidestep those pot holes, (though probably a lot of the time if we’ve landed in a pot hole it’s because we’ve willfully thrown ourselves in it), but still, we know the way out. We have the vision and the tools to navigate through life, able to discern danger from wonder, splendor from depravity, life from death.
Others of us go through life approaching fires, falling into potholes, missing out on all the magnificence of the world, simply because we think following our own whims and fancies constitutes freedom, when in reality, it just makes us captives to our own blindness.
In considering the effect of obedience to the laws on individual lives, one must remember that the purpose of this life is to prepare the soul for the next. Here one must learn to control and direct one’s animal impulses, not to be a slave to them. Life in this world is a succession of tests and achievements, of falling short and of making new spiritual advances. Sometimes the course may seem very hard, but one can witness, again and again, that the soul who steadfastly obeys the Law of Bahá’u'lláh, however hard it may seem, grows spiritually, while the one who compromises with the law for the sake of his own apparent happiness is seen to have been following a chimera: he does not attain the happiness he sought, he retards his spiritual advance and often brings new problems upon himself.
(written on behalf of the Universal House of Justice)
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Recently, I had a conversation with a self-proclaimed Anarchist. He was quite confident that his moral nature was sufficient to guide his life, that everyone possesses this inherent morality and should be allowed to express it without adherence to guidelines. It may be true for him and it may also be true that each one of us has a certain degree of innate morality inextricably linked to our spiritual nature. However, it is still up to every individual to refine their values. One could argue that, even if we don’t adhere to a set of rules in this day, one’s sense of “morality” has its roots from past laws or guidelines that have permeated humanity throughout the duration of our existence and made it the “norm”. But where do these guidelines stem from? It is globally evident that divine religious scripture past and present has had the most impact on our moral frameworks, in particular the commonly-held spiritual teachings.
