Paragraph 180

O my beloved! Immeasurably exalted is the celestial Melody above the strivings of human ear to hear or mind to grasp its mystery! How can the helpless ant step into the court of the All-Glorious? And yet, feeble souls, through lack of understanding, reject these abstruse utterances, and question the truth of such traditions. Nay, none can comprehend them save those that are possessed of an understanding heart. Say, He is that End for Whom no end in all the universe can be imagined, and for Whom no beginning in the world of creation can be conceived. Behold, O concourse of the earth, the splendors of the End, revealed in the Manifestations of the Beginning!

On to paragraph 20 of the thirty paragraphs focusing on "pure abstraction and essential unity", the first of the two stations of the Manifestations of God. We're getting there, slowly but surely.

"O my beloved!" What a beautiful opening to this paragraph. What a tender way to touch our heart, allowing His words to sink just that little bit deeper.

But what words, what concept is it that He is trying to get us to understand on an even deeper level?

We think it is that "celestial Melody" which has been mentioned numerous times in this book. Now, it's interesting to note that in the previous paragraph, the melody that is intoned by Husayn is not capitalized. It is in the lower case. But here it is capitalized. Perhaps that's because the melody sung by the Manifestation is that capital M Melody, while the "cover version" sung by those lovers is just that, a cover version, to use a modern analogy.

What is this melody? What is it trying to say? We think it is the absolute oneness of the Messengers of God. Remember, this whole section is all about that theme. In fact, one could argue that this whole book, if not the Revelation of Baha'u'llah itself, is all about this exalted theme.

Let's step back a second, though. He also says that it is beyond our ability to "grasp its mystery". Really? It's beyond our ability to understand that the Messengers are all one?

Well, yes.

Think about it for a moment. How can it be that Baha'u'llah is, I mean really is, the same as Muhammad, and Adam, and Moses, and Jesus, and Buddha, and all the other Manifestations of the divine Spirit? Again, think about it. How can they really be one and the same? This is quite the mystery. We might say, on a poetical or metaphorical level, that they are like each other. But Baha'u'llah seems to be going quite a bit further. He seems to say that yes, they really are absolutely identical. "Pure abstraction and essential unity."

How can we, puny mortals that we are, even begin to hope to comprehend this incredible reality?

It's true, He says. Yet, there are those who deny it, those "feeble souls". Why are they called "feeble"? We are not sure, but they are definitely not showing the strength of character to confront the difficulties in their faith. Instead, they just outright deny the statements, claim they are not authentic. Remember, these traditions He just cited, from Ali and Husayn, are not in the Qur'an. They are Hadith. Traditions that have been passed down through the ages. Since these "feeble souls" don't understand them, rather than struggle to come to an understanding they just say that they're not true traditions. They reject the validity of them.

But there are those who do accept them, who do comprehend them to a degree. What distinguishes them from the former? Their heart.

Imagine, for a moment, you grew up as a fundamentalist Christian. And yes, we can use any religion, but we're just choosing one at random. You have been taught the Jesus is the one and only. Now you are being asked to think of Muhammad as a Manifestation, too. It would be very easy to give a blanket denial and say no way. But it takes a special kind of openness, a rare kind of heart, to accept that how you feel about Jesus is how the Muslim feels about Muhammad, and give that respect, too. This is not a condition of the mind. It is a condition of the heart.

Once we accept that others feel about their Messenger as we do about ours, it is a short distance to recognition and love. It is no longer a major leap of faith, but instead becomes a simple step of love.

But what about that last line? "Behold, O concourse of the earth, the splendors of the End, revealed in the Manifestations of the Beginning!" How are we to understand this? Well, there are a number of ways. After all, we're talking about sacred text, so there are numerous levels on which we can understand this.

Given the mystical nature of this question, it may be a good idea to look to His most mystical work, The Seven Valleys. In the Realm of Knowledge, the third valley which is called "Realm" in this new translation, He talks about the lover who is chased by the night watchmen. At first he curses them for the torment he is feeling, but when he climbs over the wall to escape them, finds the lover he has been seeking. Then, after this, he lavishes his praise on these same watchmen, for they were the ones who led him to his goal. Baha'u'llah then says that if he, the lover, had seen the end in the beginning, he would have praised these watchmen all along. But then He mentions that this is the last "station of limitation" before we enter the Valley of Unity.

Perhaps that's where we are here in the Iqan.

By seeing the Messengers as separate, we limit them. We place limits upon creation.

But when we understand their absolute unity, their essential oneness, we begin to recognize that they truly are unique.

Remember, back at the beginning of Part Two Baha'u'llah spoke of how They are at the pinnacle of creation, that central focal point between God and man. In His hierarchy of creation, the Manifestations were clearly at the top, which is one of the reasons why we obey them.

When we understand this, then we cannot imagine a world, a universe, existing without a Messenger of God. We begin to see why they are referred to as having neither beginning nor end. And we begin to get a glimpse of the beauty and majesty of even Adam, who suffered His loss of reputation for having eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, so that we could begin to walk on this millennials-long path to get to this point in history and be shown this truth, and hear this divine Melody.

And remember, one of the attributes of a melody is that it is beautiful to listen to. What could be more beautiful than seeing the love you feel for your Manifestation in all people.

Paragraph 179

Likewise, strive thou to comprehend the meaning of the melody of that eternal beauty, Ḥusayn, son of ‘Alí, who, addressing Salmán, spoke words such as these: “I was with a thousand Adams, the interval between each and the next Adam was fifty thousand years, and to each one of these I declared the Successorship conferred upon my father.” He then recounteth certain details, until he saith: “I have fought one thousand battles in the path of God, the least and most insignificant of which was like the battle of Khaybar, in which battle my father fought and contended against the infidels.” Endeavor now to apprehend from these two traditions the mysteries of “end,” “return,” and “creation without beginning or end.”

Here we are at paragraph 19 of these thirty paragraphs focusing on "pure abstraction and essential unity", the first of the two stations of the Manifestations of God.

The first thing that we noticed here is the word "likewise" at the beginning. What is He likening it to? The quote in the previous paragraph, “A thousand Fáṭimihs I have espoused, all of whom were the daughters of Muḥammad, Son of ‘Abdu’lláh, the ‘Seal of the Prophets’”.

You will recall that he, Ali, is not saying that he married a thousand women, all of whom were Muhammad's daughter. No. He is talking about the recurrence of themes that are all under the general category of the "Return".

Similar to his marriage to Fátimih, Ali is saying that all the Messengers had successors, like him. Each and every one of Them also faced these incredible battles. Over and over the similarities between all the Manifestations is evident. This is His overarching theme throughout this book, the absolute oneness of the Messengers.

What really stands out to us in this paragraph, though, are the words "strive" and "endeavor". There is an importance to the effort we make, a value to the striving. While we can never truly understand the full vastness of all of this, we can come to a better and better understanding. As we mentioned so many times in our study of the first paragraphs of this book, the time we take to pray and meditate and make a concentrated effort to study these concepts, the better we will make sense of it all.

So often in religion, we are taught things as if they are in a fixed and firm chronological order. We are taught there is a beginning and an ending, from Genesis to Revelation, with nothing before or after that. But when we read our sacred texts, we see that this is not the case. We see many references to the "beginning that hath no beginning" or the "end that hath no end". We see continual thoughts about the concept of eternity, as well as the explicit statements about a "Return".

How are we to make sense of all this, given the current concepts that are taught?

Well, this goes back to the statements at the beginning of the book, and the idea found throughout all religious texts. We need to see the world through our own eyes, and not through the eyes of others. We need to listen to the voice of the divine with our own ears, not the ears of others.

It's also worth noting that even though we aren't from this culture, the one that these traditions come from, we still have the capacity to understand them. Of course, there's probably a lot more to them than we are aware of, but isn't that always true when dealing with religious ideas?

Through these two traditions, the one about a thousand Adams, and the one about the battle, He is asking us to strive to "apprehend... the mysteries of 'end,' 'return,' and 'creation without beginning or end.'”

The best parallel we can think of is the calendar. The Gregorian year ends on 31 December, and the next one begins the following day. In fact, it begins at the very moment the previous one ends. But is it the end of time? Of course not. The end of December means the "return" of January. Time, outside the imposed boundaries of the calendar system we happen to use, has no beginning and no end. It is continual.

Unlike this post. We could easily continue, but feel this is enough for now.