The "Pearls" of Baha'u'llah's Revelation
Matthew Weinberg (mweinberg@energy.ota.gov)
Thu, Apr 13 1995 17:30:48 GMT
O My servants! Deprive not yourselves of the unfading and resplendent
Light that shineth within the Lamp of Divine glory. Let the flame of
the love of God burn brightly within your radiant hearts. Feed it with
the oil of Divine guidance, and protect it within the shelter of your
constancy. Guard it within the globe of trust and detachment from all
else but God, so that the evil whisperings of the ungodly may not
extinguish its light. O My servants! My holy, My divinely ordained
Revelation may be likened unto an ocean in whose depths are concealed
innumerable pearls of great price, of surpassing luster. It is the
duty of every seeker to bestir himself and strive to attain the shores
of this ocean, so that he may, in proportion to the eagerness of his
search and the efforts he hath exerted, partake of such benefits as
have been pre-ordained in God's irrevocable and hidden Tablets. If no
one be willing to direct his steps towards its shores, if every one
should fail to arise and find Him, can such a failure be said to have
robbed this ocean of its power or to have lessened, to any degree, its
treasures? How vain, how contemptible, are the imaginations which
your hearts have devised, and are still devising! O My servants! The
one true God is My witness! This most great, this fathomless and
surging Ocean is near, astonishingly near, unto you. Behold it is
closer to you than your life-vein! Swift as the twinkling of an eye ye
can, if ye but wish it, reach and partake of this imperishable favor,
this God-given grace, this incorruptible gift, this most potent and
unspeakably glorious bounty.
O My servants! Could ye apprehend with what wonders of My munificence
and bounty I have willed to entrust your souls, ye would, of a truth,
rid yourselves of attachment to all created things, and would gain a
true knowledge of your own selves--a knowledge which is the same as
the comprehension of Mine own Being. Ye would find yourselves
independent of all else but Me, and would perceive, with your inner
and outer eye, and as manifest as the revelation of My effulgent Name,
the seas of My loving-kindness and bounty moving within you. Suffer
not your idle fancies, your evil passions, your insincerity and
blindness of heart to dim the luster, or stain the sanctity, of so
lofty a station. Ye are even as the bird which soareth, with the full
force of its mighty wings and with complete and joyous confidence,
through the immensity of the heavens, until, impelled to satisfy its
hunger, it turneth longingly to the water and clay of the earth below
it, and, having been entrapped in the mesh of its desire, findeth
itself impotent to resume its flight to the realms whence it came.
Powerless to shake off the burden weighing on its sullied wings, that
bird, hitherto an inmate of the heavens, is now forced to seek a
dwelling-place upon the dust. Wherefore, O My servants, defile not
your wings with the clay of waywardness and vain desires, and suffer
them not to be stained with the dust of envy and hate, that ye may not
be hindered from soaring in the heavens of My divine knowledge.
--Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah, CLIII (excerpt)
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Matthew Weinberg <mweinberg@energy.ota.gov>