Drawing on Divine:Bahai perspectives

http://www.bahaiperspectives.com/inspiration/2010/03/06/drawing-on-the-divine/

We go through life hitching our wagons to stars that fall; whereupon we are miserable, and lasso the next ones. Our leaves shrivel, our moons wane, the marbles we build our statues of are crumbled. Only God is always strong, always there, always permanent. Only God is worthy to be worked for. And to achieve this detachment from everything except God we require prayer.

(Marzieh Gail, Dawn over Mount Hira)

We all struggle with our existence. To understand ourselves and to understand one another. Yet it seems that ‘finding ourselves’ is not something we can actually do on our own. Shoghi Effendi explains that the more we search for ourselves the less likely we are to find ourselves; ‘Abdu’l-Bahá explains that the master key to self-discovery is self-forgetfulness. But this task of forgetting ourselves is very difficult. Especially living immersed in a social reality that begs to differ all the time.

We are exposed to music, television, films, books and popular thought that insist on the promotion of self as the key to happiness, that tell us “self-help” is “within our reach!” And then provide us with easy a+b=c formulas in self-help books and manuals to achieve just that. But do they really work? Probably not, or else why would keep buying the manuals? We’re not satisfied yet......