What we are
witnessing
is the beginning of the history of humankind,
the history of a human race conscious of its own oneness.
is the beginning of the history of humankind,
the history of a human race conscious of its own oneness.
Dear Angels,
The
following NINETEEN quotes are part of a statement from the Baha'i
International Community examining the events of the last century in
the light of the Baha'i teachings and relating these developments to
the challenges facing humanity.
To reflect and act upon them could change the world!
To reflect and act upon them could change the world!
*
1. ...the entire enterprise that we call civilization is itself a
spiritual process, one in which the human mind and heart have created
progressively more complex and efficient means to express their inherent
moral and intellectual capacities.
2. Humanity, the arrowhead
of the evolution of consciousness, passes through stages analogous to
the periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence in the lives of its
individual members. The journey has brought us to the threshold of our
long-awaited coming of age as a unified human race.
3. The wars,
exploitation, and prejudice that have marked immature stages in the
process should not be a cause of despair but a stimulus to assuming the
responsibilities of collective maturity.
4. The unification of
the earth's inhabitants is neither a remote utopian vision nor,
ultimately, a matter of choice. It constitutes the next, inescapable
stage in the process of social evolution, a stage toward which all the
experience of past and present is impelling us.
5. Until this
issue is acknowledged and addressed, none of the ills afflicting our
planet will find solutions, because all the essential challenges of the
age we have entered are global and universal, not particular or
regional.
6. Today, the ethnic conflicts that continue to wreak
havoc in many parts of the world are seen not as natural features of the
relations among diverse peoples, but as willful aberrations that must
be brought under effective international control.
7. ...the
human race is now endowed with the means needed to realize the visionary
goals summoned up by a steadily maturing consciousness. Viewed more
deeply, this empowerment is potentially available to all of the earth's
inhabitants, without regard to race, culture, or nation.
8.
...how much more suffering and ruin must be experienced by our race
before we wholeheartedly accept the spiritual nature that makes us a
single people, and gather the courage to plan our future in the light of
what has been so painfully learned.
9. If human consciousness
is essentially spiritual in nature--as the vast majority of ordinary
people have always been intuitively aware--, its development needs
cannot be understood or served through an interpretation of reality that
dogmatically insists otherwise.
10. Each individual person
comes into the world as a trust of the whole, and it is this feature of
human existence that constitutes the real foundation of the social,
economic and cultural rights that the United Nations Charter and its
related documents articulate. Justice and unity are reciprocal in their
effect.
11. To exalt such goals as acquisition and
self-assertion as the purpose of life is to promote chiefly the animal
side of human nature. Nor can simplistic messages of personal salvation
any longer address the yearnings of generations who have come to know,
with deep certainty, that true fulfillment is as much a matter of this
world as it is of the next.
12. ...whatever its past
contributions, the longer the nation state persists as the dominant
influence in determining the fate of humankind, the longer will the
achievement of world peace be delayed and the greater will be the
suffering inflicted on the earth's population.
13. In humanity's
economic life, no matter how great the blessings brought by
globalization, it is apparent that this process has also created
unparalleled concentrations of autocratic power that must be brought
under international democratic control if they are not to produce
poverty and despair for countless millions.
14. ...patterns of
habit and attitude which have taken root over thousands of years are not
abandoned either spontaneously or in response simply to education or
legislative action.
15. ...Whether in the life of the individual
or that of society, profound change occurs more often than not in
response to intense suffering and to unendurable difficulties that can
be overcome in no other way.
16. Just so great a testing
experience, Bahá'u'lláh warned, is needed to weld the earth's diverse
peoples into a single people.
17. Despite widely prevalent
opinion to the contrary, the human race is not a blank tablet on which
privileged arbiters of human affairs can freely inscribe their own
wishes. The springs of the spirit rise up where they will, as they will.
They will not indefinitely be suppressed by the detritus of
contemporary society.
18. However great the turmoil, the period
into which humanity is moving will open to every individual, every
institution, and every community on earth unprecedented opportunities to
participate in the writing of the planet's future.
19. The turmoil now convulsing human affairs is unprecedented [...] Dangers unimagined in all history gather around a distracted humanity. The greatest error that the world's leadership could make at this juncture, however, would be to allow the crisis to cast doubt on the ultimate outcome of the process that is occurring. A world is passing away and a new one is struggling to be born.
*
To complete your reading, the entire statement, released in February 1999, is available HERE.
Be wonderfully blessed !
Loesha
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