Ron Price

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”—Tom Paine(1737-1809), an author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States
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A BURGEONING LITERATURE

I make no attempt to keep up with the burgeoning resources now available on the Babi and Baha'i Faiths.  If one includes related subjects from what has become an interdisciplinary field of study, no scholar--to say nothing about the humble and ordinary individual--can claim to be the possessor of what used to be referred to as "the qualification of comprehensive knowledge."(1)  The mega-historian Arnold Toynbee, in his massive 12 volume opus A Study of History, suggests that to have read everything in any one major field of study became impossible by the beginning of the 20th century, to say nothing of the entire field of known knowledge on that subject.  He gives the example of Lord Acton(1834-1902) as one of the last men who tried.  In these years of the new Baha'i paradigm: 1996 to 2011---there has been a burgeoning of resources with the internet providing a library of virtually infinite proportions to those with both access to it and interest in utilizing its increasingly vast libraries. 

A RECENT ITEM ON THIS NEW WORLD FAITH

The following is the latest item of personal interest to me on the Babi-Baha'i Faiths.  This website is an expression of my interests and aptitudes and, if others share them, they will find this site of use.  I post this latest item here for the possible interest of readers. This item below concerns Robert Atkinson a professor of human development and director of the Life Story Center at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of seven books, as well as the forthcoming Humanity’s Evolving Story: Seven Principles Guiding Us Toward a Consciousness of Oneness. Go to: http://www.noetic.org/noetic/issue-nine-april/toward-oneness/  for an artilce by Professor Atkinson on this subject.

I mention Atkinson and his work here because of this website's general orientation to autobiography, memoirs and life-narratives: my own and the interdisciplnary field centred around these subjects.  Mention is made of Atkinson's book in the latest volume of Bahá'í World(2) which features articles on global terrorism and UN Millennium events.  "Also included in Baha'i World are essays that give Bahá'í perspectives on contemporary topics and trends. An essay by Robert Atkinson entitled "Culture and the Evolution of Consciousness" discusses the relationship between the development of culture and humanity's growing awareness of its essential oneness. Go to the following link for more details: http://news.bahai.org/story/152

Symbols of Transformation is an essay also mentioned in the new list of books available at the USA Baha'i Distribution Service  See also: Remembering 1969 by Robert Atkinson, Baha'i Publishing. Remembering 1969 is the story of one man's search for personal spiritual growth during the transitional times of the 1960s. Robert Atkinson offers a beautifully written portrait of a defining, transformative year in his young adult life and, in the process, tells the story of a generation in transition.  Also mentioned as co-authors are: Anne Gordon Perry, Robert Atkinson, Rosanne Adams-Junkins, Richard Grover, Diane Iverson, Robert H. Stockman, Burton W.F. Trafton Jr.
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(1) Abdul-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, Baha'i Pub. Trust,, Wilmette, 1975(1957), p.36.
(2) Baha'i World is a series of annual volumes that survey activities of the Baha'i community during the previous year.
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Readers can find a 6000 word commentary and context for the 21 April 2011 Ridvan message at the Scribd site. This essay has an autobiographical flavour. Readers only need to google the words: RonPrice at Scribd  to access this essay among other pieces of my writing all of which have varying degrees of memoiristic and autobiographical flavours.

For a 400 page commentary on the new Baha'i paradigm, the new culture of learning and growth go to:

http://bahai-library.com/price_culture_learning_paradigm
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My Revelation is indeed far more bewildering than that of Muhammad...if thou dost but pause to reflect upon the days of God. -The Bab, Selections, Haifa, 1976, p.139.
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COMMUNION

J. Hillis Miller, an American literary critic, in his analysis of the writings of novelist Joseph Conrad, informs us that Conrad saw the habit of profound reflection as, ultimately, pernicious in its effects because it led to passivity and death, to the dark side of a somber pessimism and to the view of his own personality as ridiculous and an aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknowable.(1) Profound reflection, indeed, a general anti-intellectualism is common in today's world for many reasons not the least of which is the world's profound complexity.

The search for simplicity since the days of Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862), has been one of the great searches for western man.  Thoreau's journal, kept from 1839 to 1861, is useful to those who would like to study autobiography and memoirs, journals and diaries. Here are two of my favorite Thoreau quotations:  "All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hour's toil. The fight to the finish requires a certain kind of spirit.  It is that kind of spirit that is the one characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers," and  "All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed, and wakes them in the morning."(2)  -Ron Price with thanks to: (1) J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality, Belknap Press, 1965, pp.33-34, and (2) Brainy Quotes, an internet site.

The desire, as I see it, Mr. Miller,
is to obtain His bounty and tender,
so tender, mercy; to be a recipient
of a leaven that will leaven
the world of my being,
furnish it with writing power
and to be given the honour
of His nearness. The dark side
of existence, indeed, my corrupt
inclination is due to my failure
to achieve this communion.
It is a hopelessly appauling
process, Mr. Miller, quite
beyond the profoundest reflection,
but with plenty of room for any
reflection I might want to entertain.

1 This poem draws on a prayer of the Bab in Baha’i Prayers, p.151.

Ron Price
20 June 2000 to 11 July 2011

For aerial view of the Baha'i terraced gardens and the Shrine of the Bab go to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxesOz6rRlw&feature=player_detailpage

THE EXISTENTIAL MOMENT

This poem was written while sitting on a couch along the edge of the window gazing out from the Pilgrim House at the Shrine of the Bab. The poem is a meditation on the Shrine and the self. It was the morning of the Fifth Day of pilgrimage. This poem was written in the few minutes before going up as a group to the Archives Building. It was a warm day, as all our days were, in this the beginning of summer. I did not get to know the temperature because radio and TV were not part of my day-to-day experience; and when it was it was never in English. Our pilgrimage would soon be half over.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Three Epochs, 9 June 2000.

Oh apocalyptic one:
still a surprise,
unpredictable,
crushing agent,
place of sudden meeting
with the shadow self
which rejects divine law
in the interests of
his own imperious demands,
his alter ego,
a peeling away
of the old self.
His higher self
seeks definition:
like this golden-tipped shrine
amidst the monster of selfishness,
quintessence of passion,
weed, stark and real,
angel of darkness
that is his destiny
and the reality of
his civilization.

Ron Price
9 June 2000

ARCHITECTURE'S INSPIRATION

There are now many outstanding pieces of architecture at Baha’i centres around the world which have inspired my poetry.  Perchance these words have come from a leaven that leavens the world of being and furnishes a certain power for this art to be made manifest. Thus and so, perchance, perforce, perhaps, this poetry grows in the flowers of the crannied walls of my own life, as the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote:

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower -but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Most of my writing comes from the period of the fourth(1986-2001) and fifth(2001 to the present) epochs of a new formative age, a formative age quite unlike its Greek predecessor more than 2500 years ago. For a general time frame of a Baha'i view of history go to the following link:

http://bahai-library.com/bolhuis_chart_eras_epochs

My writing is part of a wider artistic experience of the time when what some now call the eighth wonder was designed and constructed. The precise location on Mount Carmel was designated by Bahá'u'lláh himself to his eldest son, `Abdu'l-Bahá, in 1891. `Abdu'l-Bahá planned the structure, which was designed and completed several years later by his grandson, Shoghi Effendi. The major embellishment to the spiritual and administrative centre of this new Faith was completed from the late 1980s to the first years of the 3rd millennium.

If my poetry comes to be seen in no other light than as basking in the reflected, refracted, light of the spiritual and administrative centre of that eighth wonder of the world on Mt. Carmel I will feel I have made a useful, albeit microcosmic, contribution to civilization as it was going through one of its greatest climacterics, perhaps the greatest and most aweful in the history of humankind. -Ron Price, “ A Retirement-New Direction Prose-Poem,” Pioneering Over Four Epochs, 2005 to 2011.

Perhaps the reason this poetry
has taken on such importance,
such meaning, to me during the
construction of this tapestry of
monumental terraces is the fact
that I’ve spread myself out over
two dozen towns during a pioneer
life across two continents, nearly
five decades and over four epochs.
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TRAVELLING AND AT REST

Now that I have been able to give my
spirit a rest.......I am ready to launch(1)
out into a different series of shorter
teaching exercises-not like the ones
I’ve already had in places and towns
as listed in these 30+ localities below:

Dundas Ontario------September 1962 to May 1963
St. Thomas Ontario--May 1963
London Ontario------June 1963
Hamilton Ontario----June 1963 to December 1963
Dundas Ontario------January 1964 to May 1966
Windsor Ontario-----May to June 1966
Hamilton Ontario----June to September 1966
Windsor Ontario-----September 1966 to May 1967
Brantford Ontario----May to August 1967
Frobisher Bay--------August 1967 to June 1968
Whitby Ontario-------July to December 1968
Toronto Ontario------January to May 1969
King City Ontario----June to August 1969
Picton------------------September 1969 to June 1971
Whyalla South Australia
                      --------July 1971 to December 1972
Gawler South Australia
                     ---------January 1973 to December 1973
Launceston Tasmania
                     ---------January 1974 to December 1974
Elwood Victoria------December 1975 to February 1976
Kew Victoria----------March 1975 to March 1976
Ballarat Victoria-----March 1976 to December 1978
Launceston Tasmania
                     ---------December 1978 to February 1979
Smithton Tasmania--February to May 1979
Launceston Tasmania
                     ----------May 1979 to January 1981
Zeehan Tasmania-----February 1981 to July 1982
Katherine Northern Territory
                         ------July 1982 to March 1986
South Hedland WA---March 1986 to December 1987
Stirling Western Australia
                   ------------December 1987 to July 1988
Belmont Western Australia
                ---------------July 1988 to July 1999
Wagga Wagga NSW--July 1995 to October 1995
Launceston Tasmania
                            -----August 1999 to September 1999
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I am now living in George Town Tasmania and have done so from September 1999 to the present. I have lived here longer than in any other town. I have visited over 80 other towns on the planet and they are listed at the following link:

http://www.itourist.com/members/tips/index.php?id=1051

I write all this down to tie-me-down
and so define my life and the who
and what I’ve been......so memory
will not scatter my psyche so thin
& lose a sense of who I am & was.

I write it down as I am now involved in
another launch in this 3rd millennium
pregnant with something new involving,
sitting in one place and scattering in
cyberspace the seeds of this new Day
of Revelation perhaps more effectively
than in those first 40 years: '59 to 1999.

(1) retirement from FT work in 1999, PT work in 2001 and volunteer/casual work in 2005 and engaging in internet teaching.
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There have been what you might call 3 great Baha'i diasporas in its history: 1894 to 1921, 1922 to 1963 and 1963 to the present. These diasporas are of a particular type and quite unlike the Jewish diasporas. The word diaspora comes from the Greek and  means: dispersion. It comes from the word diaspeirein to scatter, and from dia- + speirein to sow.  It's first known use was in 1881. In the process of these 3 dispersions and sowings, if you like, the Baha'i Faith has become the second most widespread religion on Earth.  Harold Bloom, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, counts at least seven great Jewish Diasporas: Babylon-Persia; Hellenistic Alexandria; Muslim and Christian Spain, including Provence-Catalonia; Renaissance Italy; Eastern Europe– Russia; Austria-Hungary together with Germany; the United States. For a context in relation to these diasporas go to:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/jun/28/the-lost-jewish-culture/


Below are 3 recent videos about Baha'is in Iran:

http://www.angelsofiran.com

I have written many poems, inspired as I was by many facets of the Bab’s and Baha'u'llah's life. Some of them are found below; some are available at the Baha’i World Centre Library in Haifa and some at several libraries around the world. Some are found at my old website. Some are found on the internet at the folowing locations. The poems found on the internet are usually ones in which: (a) the lives of the Bab and Baha'u'llah are given some wider, some social and personal context; or (b) the Baha'i Faith and some aspect of the wider society is given some context.
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https://www.dropbox.com/home#/History/Baha%27i%20History:::

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33790

http://uiforum.uaeforum.org/showthread.php?2233-Toynbee-quot-s-A-Study-of-History-and-M.-Mommen-s-An-Introduction-To-Shi-i-Islam

http://bahai-library.com/Ronprice

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26070

Reviews of and bibliographies of biographies/autobiographies of Baha'is by googling: Biographies of Baha'is and going to:

http://bahai-library.com/books/biblio/biography.autobio.

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8947

"People entering Gothic cathedrals left behind their life of material cares and seemed to pass into a different world," writes Kenneth Clark as he makes his feelings of the arts contagious in his book Civilization. In other ages buildings were constructed simply to give pleasure. Twentieth century wars have destroyed many of these buildings in a fit of modern barbarism. As this was taking place, as this barbarism was hacking into the evidences of civilization humans had erected over many centuries, a small and embryonic community that followed the teachings of its prophet-founders, the Bab and Baha'u'llah, began to erect new symbols of a new civilization.-Ron Price with thanks to Kenneth Clark, Civilization, Pelican Books, 1969, p. 167.

It was an age of minarettes
that staggered the imagination,
built high into the sky,
immense heaps of stone
and glass and aluminium.

It was also the end
of the Heroic Age
and the start
of the Formative Age
and they used this social art,
architecture,
to help us lead fuller lives,
to touch life at many points,
to give us that douceur de vivre,
that sweetness of life
at places all over the world.

Ron Price
29 May 2003
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A LETTER TO PHILIP ADAMS

86 Fitzroy Road
Rivervale
Western Australia 6103

20 September 1996

Dear Phillip

After listening to LNL, Late-Night-Live and reading your columns for over twenty-five years, since coming to Australia from Canada in 1971, I first want to thank you for giving me a great deal of pleasure. I have always been more comfortable in your brand of atheism with its great interest in ‘things religious’ than in a wide range of various theisms that have been unattractrive to me intellectually.

I would, though, like to share with you page 771 from Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History, Vol. 7B(Oxford University Press, NY, 1963). The two religions, according to Toynbee, that have emerged in Western civilization are: Baha’i and Ahmadiyah. Just what makes a religion separate from a sect, cult, denomination, indeed one of several other sociological terms that give what one might call a typology or classification framework for the study of religions and their many offshoots—is quite a complex question.

I particularly enjoyed your TV series with Paul Davies. I thought he opened the door to a view of religion that was acceptable to the skeptic, the rationalist, the so-called unbeliever. I look forward, as I’m sure millions of others in Australia, to your own continuing development as a person who has broadened the religious experience of the faithful from many religious persuasions and softened the anti-religious sentiments of the avowed atheists and agnostics.

I remember seeing you from a distance at a podium at the then Ballarat College of Advanced Education in, I think it was 1977 or 1978, when I was myself lecturing there in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. I am now working in the Tafe system in Western Australia as a lecturer. I am fifty-two and will retire in a few years.

As I have got older I am finding myself writing more letters. Perhaps I will write to you, I think to myself, more regularly than once in every quarter-century. We shall see. In the meantime thank you again for the very rich contribution you have made to my intellectual life Downunder. The God you don’t believe in I don’t believe in either. Einstein liked the term Mystery. Perhaps ‘Unknowable Essence which the wisdom of the wise and the learning of the learned have failed to comprehend’ gets a little warm.

I leave this large question for now and wish you well in your future professional and personal life. May you go on to have many years pondering both the imponderable and the ponderable. It makes great listening.

Cheers

Ron Price
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A link to a recent reports: (1) in Time magazine about the Baha'i Faith and (2) the Baha'is in Egypt:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2081789,00.html

http://news.bahai.org/story/817

A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS

The New Negro Movement, sometimes called the Harlem Renaissance, took place at the same time as the development of the Baha’i Administrative Order, 1921-1936. The Baha’i Faith in America evolved from a small local group to a national unit of a world society during these years.(1) Some writers take the boundaries of the evolution of each of these movements from the late teens to the late thirties. In 1937 the Baha’is launched their first teaching Plan and in Harlem at the Apollo Theatre, the epi-centre for the largest urban centre for Negroes--some 400,000—Negroes were allowed to sit in with the whites for the first time anywhere in the USA—in back rows in upper balconies.(2)-Ron Price with thanks to (1)Loni Bramson-Lerche, “Development of Baha’i Administration,” Studies in Babi & Baha’i History, Vol.1, Moojan Momen, editor, Kalimat Press, 1982, p. 255. There has been a relative paucity of scholarship on both the Baha’i movement for this period and the Negro movement; and (2)ABC Radio National, “The Harlem Renaissance,” 2:00-2:30 pm, September 16th 2006.

Henry Gates said there were(1)
four cultural renaissances for
African Americans and I’d say
they mirror the years of the first
century of the Baha’i Faith
in America: 1894 to 1994.

The Baha’i renaissances are
of a different order & quality.
But there was an optimism in
both movements—excessively,
unrealistically high expectations,
a blinkeredness, understandings
beyond the reach of those times,
those generations but growing
now and underpinning a new
determination to serve a purpose
unfolding within an old obscurity
and a vision of world-shaping trends.

1 Henry Gates, “Harlem on Our Minds,” Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1997.

Ron Price
September 16th 2006
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BURSTING THE WALLS

In June 1852 Karl Marx obtained an admission card to the reading room of the British Museum. There he would sit from 10:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. every day, pouring over Blue Books of factory inspectors and perusing the immense documentation about the inequities of the operation of the capitalist system that was to become an important part of Das Kapital published in 1867. Here also, filling notebook after notebook, he deepened his knowledge of the British political economists whom he had begun to study during the Paris days. -Ron Price with thanks to Lewis A.. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, 2nd ed., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., Fort Worth, 1977, pp. 63-65.

In that same June 1852 Baha’u’llah began His last two months before His imprisonment in the Siyah Chal on August 16th 1852. He stayed at the summer residence of the brother of the Grand Visier in Lavasan outside Tihran. During this summer He was kept informed of the rising and ultimately engulfing tide of anger and hatred against Him, especially from the Shah’s mother. We are informed by Balyuzi that “Baha’u’llah remained calm and composed.”1 Baha’u’llah’s enemies wanted to arrest Him and while they were looking for Him Baha’u’llah rode out toward them without fear or panic.-Ron Price with thanks to H. Balyuzi, Baha’u’llah The King of Glory, George Ronald, Oxford, 1980, p.77.

So much had got going back in ’44,
manuscripts produced in that spring
and summer, a fertile partnership,1
one in Paris and one in Shiraz,
would transform the world.

Much more got going in ’52
when a Revelation flowed out
from His travailing soul,
piercing the gloom of that
pestilential pit and bursting
its walls to propagate itself
to the far ends of the earth.

And from that museum, too,
something would infuse the
entire body of humankind
with its potentialities shaping
the course of human society.

1 Marx’s first writings The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts date from the summer of 1844; the Bab’s manuscript, the Qayyum’u’l-Asma, written in May of 1844 was read later in the summer by a scholar named Qujjat and 1000s of Qujjat’s fellow townspeople in Zanjan became Babis.

Ron Price
July 15th 2006


There are many Baha'i sites in cyberspace you can google yourself. Here is one below for starters:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#inbox/13640f227a69387c

For an excellent list of books and articles on the Babi and Baha'i Faiths as well as a substantial part or the entire book itself go to:
http://bahaistudies.net/