Being and Empowerment: Introduction

(This is the rough beginning of what I hope will be the introduction of a long essay spoken about in the essay blog. Most of the research will be documented there but I will be posting chapters and paragraphs here. I would love some feedback on the content and suggestions for other literary sources to be used.)


I have been thinking about the social model of personal and community development envisioned in the Baha'i community. It is becoming more and more apparent that the unity we envision will only come about when each of us take ownership of our potential and responsibility to the process. There will be no passive observers in the transformation.

For many it is challenging to be around large crowds of people. There is an inverse relationship between the number of people at a gathering and the quality of interaction that ensues. At a certain point one can feel completely isolated. In the Baha'i community, there has been a significant shift in the past few years to hold activities in peoples homes instead of a centralized location. These activities are no longer events in which a few perform and the rest spectate. Instead, everything is viewed as a process of building capacity within ourselves and the community. Being a Baha'i means actively working to overcome the divisions which plague our society, not standing in the larger and larger rooms together until the whole world is enclosed.

All too often we have been content with a superficial unity reflected in a type of large group mingling. In the dominance of the crowd the real potential and vulnerabilities of people are neglected, and hence we become passive observers to an evanescent impulse. Thus, as Paulo Freire would conceptualize it, we are like banks in which those who speak eloquently and can dominate a discussion deposit their wisdom as the rest of us save it up. This is how most religion today operates, with the members coming a few times a month to "do the church thing", without reflecting on how it relates to their lives and institutions.

We must realize that we have been given the spiritual tools and the dignity to realize the change within our hearts and to build these new divine institutions with our own hands. A Baha'i study circle stands as a model of engaging people of very different bearings in a singular study of spiritual human potential, while at the same time providing the flexibility of dialogue and independent thought. In each study course, a new practice is introduced which builds capacity for service to the community. By completing the last study course people are trained to bring along others through this process.

Spiritual empowerment requires an understanding of being itself and the process of a self-reflection and spiritualization. As this concept is investigated we can begin to define its relevance in a collective process to create real change in the world. The question of being has been a preoccupation of philosophers and religionists for quite some time. Martin Heidegger devoted his whole philosophical career to exploring this question, while Paulo Freire identified the "humanization" of being as a prerequisite to social transformation. This essay attempts to explore the historical thinking on being and community empowerment and place in a spiritual context using the Baha'i institute process as a model.