Transcript:Steven Phelps/The Call of the Divine Beloved Pt 1

Transcript of: The Call of the Divine Beloved  (2019) by Steven Phelps Session 1/10

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Note, this transcript has not been proofread and will contain many errors.

[0:00] [Dr. Phelps] All right welcome everybody to our read-through of the Call of the Divine Beloved which we will probably take several weeks if not a few months to get through, will see how the speed goes. This a very very special volume of Bahá’u’lláh writings. Well in one way it's not special because the majority of it by page count is Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys has existed in a previous translation and what we have in this in this new volume are revised translations of the Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys and in addition a few additional works of Bahá’u’lláh which have not before been seen in English, and which give extra context and fill out the picture more of this topic of the mystical quest. What for me makes the volume exceptionally special is the presence at the beginning of it of the first surviving work of Bahá’u’lláh, the Rashḥ-i-‘Amá, or as it's been translated the Clouds of the Realms Above, which was revealed by Bahá’u’lláh while he was in the prison of the Síyáh-Chál in Tehran for several months, probably in late 1852. And the work the new volume opens with this beautiful but really impossible to translate poem. But before we get into the Rashḥ-i-‘Amá and I wanted to spend most of today going through this poem, really line by line, with with reference to the Persian, may be to introduce a little bit more the volume itself. Because one can think of this volume perhaps in the most obvious sense as a manual for the spiritual quest, along the lines of manuals for spiritual journey that have been written over the centuries by people from all the great faith traditions of the world of the East and the West. But there's something else going on in this volume, there's a second message, it's almost as though Bahá’u’lláh is broadcasting on two frequencies simultaneously, he's at one and the same time recapitulating these timeless elements of the spiritual journey, which one will find I think familiar whatever religious tradition one comes from there'll be familiar elements in it, at the same time Bahá’u’lláh is writing these works in some cases ten years prior to His more public declaration of His own prophetic mission and so these works all represent a period of time prior to Bahá’u’lláh's being known among those with whom He was conversing and those with whom He was in contact. None of these people knew the prophetic secret that He Himself carried, and so these works are ostensibly written by at most a prominent member of the Bábí community. But what He is also delivering to us, and it's only possible to see these things in hindsight, is He's also hinting to those who have the ear to hear it, He's hinting at His own prophetic mission which will become public later.

[4:15] What Bahá’u’lláh is doing it in a way I think is negotiating a certain problem, a certain intractable problem with written words. And this intractable problem was first mentioned actually by Plato, going back you know 2500 years or so. And the problem with words is that, not just words but the written word, is that you can't control your audience. And that's a big difference between... you might think well the spoken word in the written word are just two versions of the same thing, but the spoken word is fundamentally different in that you always know to whom you are speaking. If you're having a conversation, if you're speaking in a group you can adjust what you're saying to the audience, to the hearer. And behind this of course is the assumption that not everybody needs to hear the same thing, not everyone is in a position or has the capacity or has... And when it comes to most of the things that people write words about, that doesn't really matter. The fact that there are different audiences for different kinds of words, you know if you write a high level physics textbook you know that the audience for that is limited. You're not worried about the fact that people who don't understand these concepts might pick it up and be confused. But when it comes to sacred writings, when it comes to holy books which are meant to be consumed by everyone, which are meant to be read by everyone equally, there's a problem of audience. And the problem is that not everyone is at the same degree of understanding and so who are you addressing? Who is your audience? If you're the Prophet and you have a certain message and you know that message is multifaceted and you know that there are different levels to it, what sort of language do you use to express yourself? Anyway, just to encapsulate what this problem of language is this from one of the Platonic dialogues the Phaedrus and this Socrates speaking, he says you know Phaedrus that's the strange thing about writing which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painters product stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words, they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever. And once a thing is put in writing the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it but equally of those who have no business with it. It doesn't know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill treated and unfairly abused, it always needs its parent to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself. And Phaedra says, once again Socrates you are perfectly right. [Laughter].

[7:34] So in a way, this a challenge that the prophets throughout the ages have found a way of addressing that really uniquely distinguishes the revelation from other kinds of words. Other kinds of words are written to a particular audience, but somehow the prophets are able to speak in a way that everyone gets something out of it, everyone takes something away from it. And what some people take away from it may be very different from what other people take away from it. And I think that's happening here, particularly and I think that's one of the major messages of the tablets in this volume. And it's also I think a subtext of the first work in this volume the Rashḥ-i-‘Amá, this poem of 19 or in some cases 20 couplets that Bahá’u’lláh revealed in in late 1852 in which He is describing something from two points of view simultaneously. And what he's describing is, and this repeated in each of the couplets of the poem, what's describing is the raining down of something. It's the raining down of the Rashḥ-i-‘Amá, which is a Persian word which roughly translates to, a rashḥ is a sprinkling or a raining down, it's a sort of a drifting down, it's not like a heavy rain but it's like a mist, a falling mist. And ‘amá is particularly difficult to translate, it perhaps literally means cloud and so it's the sprinkling of the cloud, but it's not really a cloud in the sense of a cloud that brings rain, it's a cloud in a different sense. It's the cloud that obscures light and that obscures knowledge, it obscures the knowledge of that which is on the other side of the cloud. The Báb in one of His tablets describes the Prophet as the Primal Veil, He says above this Veil there's only God and beneath this Veil you see everything emanating from God. So there is the idea of the Prophet being a mediator between that which is truly and permanently unknown, and that which is known in the world, and that cloud is that which interposes between us and that ultimate realm of the unknowable.

[10:33] ‘Abdu’l-Bahá in one of his Tablets describes this ‘Amá, describes this cloud in the following terms and it's a short explanation that's in the end notes of the volume. He says:

“

‘Amá is defined as an extremely thin and subtle cloud, seen and then not seen. For shouldst thou gaze with the utmost care, thou wouldst discern something, but as soon as thou dost look again, it ceaseth to be seen. For this reason, in the usage of mystics who seek after truth, ‘Amá signifieth the Universal Reality without individuations as such, for these individuations exist in the mode of uncompounded simplicity and oneness and are not differentiated from the Divine Essence. Thus they are individuated and not individuated. This is the station alluded to by the terms Aḥadíyyih [Absolute Oneness] and ‘Amá. This is the station of the “Hidden Treasure” mentioned in the Ḥadíth.

”

[11:31] And the Ḥadíth of the Hidden Treasure says:

“

I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known. Therefore I brought creation into being, that I might become known.

”

[Editors note: Dr. Phelps interjected the Ḥadíth, and the quote from ‘Abdu’l-Bahá continues:]

“

The divine attributes, therefore, are individuations that exist in the Essence but are not differentiated therefrom. They are seen and then not seen. This, in brief, is what is meant by ‘Amá.

”

[11:52] So this might just cloud things further, no pun intended, if one is not familiar with the whole technical terminology of philosophical Sufism that makes a very important distinction between two different kinds of oneness. There's the oneness of as the phrase here of Aḥadíyyih, the oneness beyond the cloud, the undifferentiated oneness which is not even oneness, you know which is even beyond the word oneness. And then there's the oneness below the cloud, the oneness of ???, the oneness which might be thought of as a unity comprised of particulars, which is another kind of oneness but it's a lower level of oneness. So ‘Abdu’l-Bahá associates this idea of the cloud with this idea of undifferentiated oneness.

[12:42] The idea of the cloud is also not unique, and the idea of the mystical force and depth of the idea of a cloud as representative of divine unknowing was not invented by Bahá’u’lláh in this tablet, it goes back quite a long ways as well and one of the most famous examples of this, and we don't know whether Bahá’u’lláh was aware of this or not, but there's actually a work written in Middle English sometime probably in the late 1300s called the Cloud of Unknowing which is a spiritual handbook which bears of the mystical tradition in Christianity. And somewhere in the middle of this of this handbook we have a definition of the cloud which we'll find is quite similar in its own way to the definition that ‘Abdu’l-Bahá gives about the cloud being something which is not seen, it's not something which is tangible, and this what the unknown author of the cloud of unknowing says, he says:

“

Do not think that because I call it a ‘darkness’ or a ‘cloud’ it is the sort of cloud you see in the sky, or the kind of darkness you know at home when the light is out. That kind of darkness or cloud you can picture in your mind’s eye in the height of summer, just as in the depth of a winter’s night you can picture a clear and shining light. I do not mean this at all. By ‘darkness’ I mean ‘a lack of knowing’ – just as anything that you do not know or may have forgotten may be said to be ‘dark’ to you, for you cannot see it with your inward eye. For this reason it is called ‘a cloud’, not of the sky, of course, but ‘of unknowing’, a cloud of unknowing between you and your God

”

[14:43] So an alternative title for this Tablet of Bahá’u’lláh's may have been, the sprinkling of the cloud of unknowing. There's so many ways that this could have been translated, and there's so many ways that this entire work could have been translated. And the translation attempts I think to capture the impossible mean, the impossible balance point between on the one extreme translating just quite literally word-for-word everything that's said, and on the opposite extreme just going for poetry and just trying to translate it in meter with rhyme and make it as beautiful as possible. And translators not just of poetry but in general of the writings, of the Bahá’í writings and of course beyond, are faced with this dilemma. Am I going to go the literal route? And there's a school of thought that says, well it's not faithful unless it's as literal as possible. But especially with poetry if you go as literal as possible then you lose all the poetry, and the point of this is that it's a poem. And so the translation has to preserve some of the poetry of the original, and you can't hit both of them at the same time and so there's compromises that have to be made in both directions, especially if you're striking to hit somewhere in the middle. And the compromise that was made in this translation was more or less to make it metered, but a kind of blank verse where it's not rhymed, because the original has a lot of rhyme in it, as as we'll see. But the translation doesn't attempt to rhyme, but it does attempt to put it in a fairly regular meter, iambic of seven or eight feet per couplet. But it's an irregular iambic because the original also is not in a regular metrical meter either. But there's an attempt to cast it into this poetic form. So for example in the opening two lines:

“

’Tis from Our rapture that the clouds of realms above are raining down;

”

[17:10] You can count the feet on your finger and you get eight feet.

“

’Tis from Our anthem that the mysteries of faith are raining down.

”

[17:17] So it's iambic octameter I suppose you could say is the base meter. But sometimes you find seven feet and sometimes you find these stutter steps where it's not exactly in the iambic meter. The original tablet is written in Persian but almost every word of it is Arabic, and Bahá’u’lláh does this in many of His tablets where grammatically it's Persian and there are of course a number of Persian words in here, but most of the significant words are of Arabic origin. So much so that the commentary on the Rashḥ-i-‘Amá written by Dr. Rafferty? some years ago that also for the Persian speakers provides a pretty good Persian text of the of the tablet, I can photocopy this for you, it provides not just the text of the tablet but almost a glossary where verse by verse Dr. Rafferty? comments on it and almost word by word he explains for the Persian readers what these various words mean. So it's difficult in that you really need to be fairly conversant in two different languages to understand it. Bahá’u’lláh in this poem, you could say the overall theme is describing this raining down of Divine Grace that He experienced while He was in the Síyáh-Chál. Many years later He described that experience in the following terms, and when you hear this description and then listen to the words of the poem I think you'll definitely see how one is an expansion of the other. He writes:

“

During the days I lay in the prison of Ṭihrán, though the galling weight of the chains and the stench-filled air allowed Me but little sleep, still in those infrequent moments of slumber I felt as if something flowed from the crown of My head over My breast, even as a mighty torrent that precipitateth itself upon the earth from the summit of a lofty mountain. Every limb of My body would, as a result, be set afire. At such moments My tongue recited what no man could bear to hear.

”

[19:50] And the introduction goes on to say "The poetic reflection of that experience, as conveyed in Rashḥ-i-‘Amá, can perhaps never be adequately rendered into another language, yet the present translation is an initial attempt to impart a glimpse of its power and momentous themes." And people for a long time felt and believed that this poem would just forever be untranslated, and there was some who felt that it should remain so. But the House of Justice decided to allow this to be included in the volume, but with this caveat that this is just an initial attempt. I think it's fair to say that the Fitzgerald of the Bahá’í writings is yet to be born, you know Fitzgerald who famously transformed the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám into this incredible work in English which is a standalone piece, which is sometimes related to the original but if you try to map it word for word, phrase for phrase, you may be disappointed because it's not so much a translation as much as a transformation, but it fully captures the spirit of the original. It's an example of that extreme end of going for the spirit and not worrying too much about the literal word for word meaning.

[21:41] I'm wondering and would speculate whether different translations of this particular poem might eventually come out and be used for different purposes, even within the Bahá’í community. There's a tradition of having just one authorized translation that everybody uses, I don't know if it might be the case that a poem like this could be an exception where there might be a use for more literal versions for people who to see it through that lens as well as less literal versions for people who want to experience it as poetry.

[22:18] So I mentioned that the poem is in Persian and many of the terms are in Arabic and a lot of these Arabic terms are referencing at one and the same time Qur'ánic allusions to the prophecies about the day of God and the coming revelation that are embedded within the Qur'án, so there are quite a number of elements of prophetic expectation and fulfillment within this poem. At the same time, one finds that all of these Arabic words taken together constitute almost a lexicon of the mystical dimension of Bahá’u’lláh's writings and foreshadows many of the major themes that will that Bahá’u’lláh's revelation will center around in the years to come. Almost word-for-word you can pull out several dozen of these Arabic words that Bahá’u’lláh references in this tablet and many of them form central themes in later works of Bahá’u’lláh. And we'll touch on some of these as we go through the poem. And we'll see of course quite obviously to us perhaps, maybe less obviously to those who read it at the time, and had access to it at the time, Bahá’u’lláh is at one and the same time claiming but not claiming, you know it's written in two languages simultaneously, He's talking about the receipt of grace from above and the experience of this flowing down almost like water of the celestial bounties and that's the one message, and the parallel message is that He Himself is the source of it. And so he is both the recipient and the source. Who's the subject and who's the object? It ends up becoming dissolved into one, in this poem. And that's one of the curious things about it, and that also one of the things that explains why the opening verses were translated as they were. One can translate all of these verses in different ways, and oftentimes very much where you place the phrase determines where the emphasis lies.

[25:04] And in the opening lines "’Tis from Our rapture that the clouds of realms above are raining down; ’Tis from Our anthem that the mysteries of faith are raining down." already sounds this theme that it's from Bahá’u’lláh's rapture that this happening. It's Bahá’u’lláh's song that is the sources of this grace. At the same time it's coming from other than Him personally. But the opening phrase emphasizes the source of it in some sense as being Bahá’u’lláh. The opening words in the Persian: "Rashḥ-i-‘Amá................" the "....." is this raining down and every line of the poem ends with with ..........? and that has been faithfully translated as raining down, so every line ending captures that ........? by ending raining down.

[26:08] The second line of it: ".......................??" which is translated "Upon the Eastern wind Cathay’s entrancing musk doth waft; This sweetly scented breeze from Our curling locks is raining down." And it's interesting that Bahá’u’lláh references China in the second verse of this. And the musk of Cathay, which to my mind emphasizes a theme of Bahá’u’lláh's revelation that this is the tree neither of the East nor of the West. And a reference perhaps to the wisdom of the mystic East which is equally a part of this revelation.

[27:05] And in the second line: "This sweetly scented breeze from Our curling locks is raining down." Bahá’u’lláh very often in His Tablets refers to His locks, His hair as a source of some mystical potency in a way, and He often references the sweet savors of those locks. There's a body of Tablets that Bahá’u’lláh revealed, perhaps during the same time, called Tablets of the Hair, and there's several of these short little Tablets where He describes in mystical terms His own hair, and so you might not have seen these, they're sort of lesser-known works of Bahá’u’lláh. These were published in Baha'i News at 1938 or 1939 and to my knowledge not subsequently republished, and so these are kind of early translations of these fascinating short Tablets of Bahá’u’lláh about the mystical significance and potency of His hair. So one of them goes like this:

“

He is the Almighty. My hair is My Ambassador. Proclaiming at every moment upon the Branch of Fire in the Rose Garden of Holiness and Light, perchance that people of the world become severed from the dust soaring toward the Seat of Nearness, the station wherein the Light emanated from the Beauty of God, the Mighty, the Unconstrained. O Thou, ye servants of Fire! Sing and praise, then become rejoiced and hasten ye toward the Adored One while crying; There is no God but God, the Knowing, the Wise, the Loving.

”

[28:58] And then another of these short Tablets:

“

My Hair is my Fire. Therefore it is enthroned upon the seat of My cheek and as pasturing upon the Rose Garden of My Face. This is the station wherein the Son of Imron stripped from himself the garment of all save Him, and attained to the Lights of Holiness from the Fire of God, the Powerful, the Mighty, the Forgiving.

”

[28:58] There's several of these but it's interesting how the metaphor of fire is often intertwined, no pun intended, with the curling locks of His hair.

[29:35] So in the third verse He says "....................................." or "The day-star of adornment hath dawned forth above the face of God; Behold that mystic truth which from His Countenance is raining down." And in this verse, as in a number of other verses, Bahá’u’lláh is referencing particular letters of the alphabet, but to translate it literally would just lead to all sorts of confusion and so there's a degree of interpretation by the translators involved. Literally He's saying, behold the mystic truth which from the face of thaw[?] is raining down. The face of the letter th. In Persian it's pronounced saw, in arabic thaw. According to Dr. Rafate[?]'s commentary, that letter th refers to possibly two different things, it refers to the word Samadhi? or themadhi? in Arabic which means fruit. And there are Tablets of the Báb and of Bahá’u’lláh which refer to Himself as the fruit, as the fruit of the tree of being, the fruit being the highest expression of the potentiality of the tree. And this is one of the titles of Bahá’u’lláh, and that the Báb assigns to Himself. It also refers to to the to the word 3 in Arabic, and the reference here is to the fact that the Báb's name, ‘Alí Muḥammad, is comprised of three letters. And so by referring to the face of thaw?, it's saying the face of the three or the face of the three letters which is another way of referring to Himself. And Bahá’u’lláh in referencing this is giving a double entendre, He's referring to the Báb because the Báb's name was ‘Alí but Bahá’u’lláh name was also ‘Alí, Mírzá Ḥusayn-‘Alí, and so Bahá’u’lláh is referring at one and the same time to the Báb and to Himself by referring to the face of the three, or the face of saw? . So that's just one example of how there's all sorts of allusions that just can't be captured in the original.

[32:15] In the fourth line: ..............................................? So we here again this ............., the rapture is referenced several times in this poem as Bahá’u’lláh is carried away by the rapture and ecstasy of this sprinkling of the cloud. What's happening in the first half of this line, He's referring to the wave of true reunion, the ..............? and ...? is translated here as true reunion and in the Kitáb-i-Íqán it's translated as attainment to the Divine Presence, which is one of the central themes the second part of the Kitáb-i-Íqán or the Book of Certitude. So this wave of true reunion is referring to the wave of the meeting with God, which is freighted with meaning deriving back to the Qur'án. And the mystery and the challenge is that the Orthodox reading of the Qur'án and this term ....?, led some to believe that the day of God which is foretold in the Qur'án, which is also foretold in another way and in the Bible, will mean that everyone will meet the Promised One when He arrives. This .... is a physical meeting. And so it requires the Prophet to be seen to everyone, physically. And to be sort of there among the people. And this was a challenge particularly when the Báb was executed a few years after His declaration of His mission and the uncle of the Báb wrote to Bahá’u’lláh and the Kitáb-i-Íqán was written as a result. And one of the central questions was, well how can we have a meeting, how can this ........ take place? How can the attainment of the Divine Presence take place when the Prophet has already passed on to the next world, and nobody has access to Him? And so a great part of the Kitáb-i-Íqán is taken up with describing how this meeting can nevertheless take place in the spiritual realm. So, just another example of words that have a great deal of implication, and that are expanded upon greatly in the years that follow.

[35:07] The fifth couplet of the Rashḥ-i-‘Amá in most of the of the existing manuscripts does not exist. So most of the Persian texts of the Rashḥ-i-‘Amá only contain 19 lines, but a few of the texts including the one that the Research Department based its translation on contains 20, and that extra couplet is this line five right here it goes: .................................. or "The treasuries of love lay hid within the very heart of Fárs;" and Fárs this ..., this heart of Fárs is the land of Persia, Fárs is the... ......., the first letter when that's referred to is clearly referring to His home country of Persia. "From out this treasure trove the pearls of faithfulness are raining down."

[36:20] And in the sixth line, ............................... or "The splendour of the rose doth bring the ecstasy of choicest wine; This subtle music from the ringing tones of Lordship is raining down." I love how it refers to to a flower and wine and music, sort of all pulled together. These are very common themes in Sufi poetry and Bahá’u’lláh is bringing them all together in this one line. And He's referring to this ........, this song of .., and again this where if you translated it literally it would be the ringing tones of Ra, well what are the ringing tones of Ra? It would require footnotes and as you can see there are no footnotes in this tablet, you're sort of left to your own devices as a reader to figure out what it means. Although certainly every line of this could be commented upon intensely. But often times the letters Ra is a reference to ..... or lordship. And the assumption here is that the ....... are the ringing tones of lordship which is one of the stations of the of the Prophet.

[37:44] In the seventh line, ........................ And this brings a lovely juxtaposition. "The trumpet-blast of Judgement Day, the joyful bliss of heaven’s call— Both at a single breath are from the firmament now raining down." So you get both the Judgment Day, the sort of fire and brimstone, as well as the joyful bliss of heaven's called. Both the good and the bad are coming at the same time. It's bad in one sense because it's going to disintegrate an old order, but it's at the same time presaging the bliss of the Kingdom of God on Earth.

[38:36] In the eighth line, ........................, or "The Day of “I am He” ....', is made to shine resplendent from Our face;" so Bahá’u’lláh here is referencing one of the great challenging and sometimes fatal proclamations of the mystics of saying 'I am God' and so He's saying this day of “I am He”, and the He here is God, He said is shining resplendent from our face. So in retrospect it's really obvious what He's doing, you know He's making a prophetic claim, but it's garbed in the kind of language that you can say, oh well ...... said that you know centuries before he was one of the Sufi Saints who famously said ....... or 'I am the Truth', 'I am the True One' and was martyred for that. But this one of the challenging truths of the Prophet which is just as much the same challenge which issued in the opening verses of the Gospel of John, "in the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." There's an identity and at the same time a distinction. It is something which proceeds from God and is therefore separate from it, but at the same time an incarnation of the thing, and therefore it cannot be separated from it. So Bahá’u’lláh is referring to these both in the first half of this couplet saying "The Day of “I am He”"... and "The Age of “He is He” from out Our flowing cup is raining down." And this ......, also which might just seem like a tautology is another statement of that same kind of mystic unity; which is the subject of the Lawḥ-i-Náqús of Bahá’u’lláh, or the Tablet of the Bell which was translated in Days of Remembrance and published just a few years ago. And that's an ecstatic, another poetic tablet of Bahá’u’lláh that the refrain which just keeps repeating, this "Praise be to Thee, O Thou Who art “He”, O Thou besides Whom there is none but “He”!" So .............., which literally translates to O He, O thou Who art He, besides Whom there is none but He. And that He of course is the same as the I, there's a mystical unity between the two.

[41:34] In the next line, the ninth line: ................................... or "From out the fountain of Our heart hath God’s celestial river flowed; This cup of honeyed nectar from Our ruby lips is raining down." Bahá’u’lláh directly claiming to be the source of the of this Rashḥ-i-‘Amá in this in this line. ........................ or "The Day of God hath been fulfilled, for lo, the Lord hath been unveiled; This wondrous message from the melody of Ṭá’ is raining down." And here the melody of Ṭá’ probably a lot of us can guess what the melody of Ṭá’ is. Any guesses? Ṭá’ is Tehran, right. So we have fog referring to to Persia, and Ṭá’ in all likelihood referring to Tehran which is where this poem was revealed, in the dungeon of the Síyáh-Chál in Tehran.

[42:55] So a lot of letters, you know assemble, a lot of the letters that are referred to and that some of which were interpolated, translated for the translation and some were left in letter form when it was felt that enough people would would understand it, if it was just translated as the letter and that's the case with Ṭá’.

[43:16] In the next verse, verse 11: ....................... "Behold Bahá’s outpouring grace, the bounty of the clouds above," and here he repeats the Raja MA which merged into a single song in God's own voice is raining down so this merged into a single song what's being merged into a single song is you know the outpouring grace of Baja and his own grace which is which is flowing out is merged into the grace of the bounty of the clouds above so another direct expression of this mystical unity of the Prophet and the divine in the next line Mahe a sad and mad bean tile a one zapman saturday mama red bean a la Metis at or behold the Lord's Leviathan literally this the fish or the whale it's the same well that in the story of Jonah and the Whale in the Bible and the idea of this enormous fish that one is swallowed up in is theme of it can be found in in a variety of mystical literature behold the lord's leviathan behold his sacred countenance behold the blessings of the heart that from his throne are raining down literally that chaos along that from his exalted throne are raining down and in the next line na ke to ball bean Renee gave a carbine carne AB haben as La Mesa families add behold the palm of paradise behold the warbling of the dove behold the glorious hymns that in the purest light are raining down and this line in the next line gives a great example of internal rhyme that no attempt was made to render it in English but you have Renee eval car and the Carnegie Abha is you know almost it rhymes and sort of syllable for syllable and in the next line this Lian 14 are hanging at RPE bean cafe Hijazi bean cafe Elahi bean as a debate law meetings at and you might have heard that internal rind between the Deaf a a Hijazi and the cafe al aji this perhaps is the most the line that that suffered the most in translation because there's just so much behind it literally it's it's all hanging at Rocky is the is the Iraqi song so he's saying behold the Iraqi song I mean especially in nowadays it gives a whole different set of set of connotations when you talk about an Iraqi song but what it's referring to is well it ended up getting translated as Sol entrancing song and the davay ahead ja z is the drum of head jaws or the or the you know head jobs being the decided the Saudi Arabian Peninsula so bahala here is referring to the is referring to these oriental these oriental notes and the and the and the beat of the drum the da FEA Hijazi is the is the Arabian drum and then this behold the sacred rhythms that from our hand are raining down this cafe ilahe bean the CAF is the palm so the cafe Allah he's saying behold the palm of the divine palm you know and the implication is that it's striking the drum and the striking of the drum is causing this this drum beat which is raining down but what's raining down is the Saturday a law it's impossible to translate it's the it's the beating of law well what is law law and Arabic means no so he's saying it's from it's from the it's from the it's from the striking of no that is raining down well what what is this referring to is just a word of pure negation and what it's what it's referring it's pretty clear that this referring to the the Shahada of the of the Muslims la ilaha illaallah muhammaden-rasul allah or there is no god but God and Muhammad is the Messenger of God the the first article of faith of the of the Moslems which begins with the word lat it begins with the word no no God is there but God and the Mystics have had a field day with this and you know entire treatises have been have been written on the meaning of the law and the fact that it begins with the negation and ends with affirmation because you have to negate what is false before you can affirm what is true and what ends up being negated for the Sufis pretty much everything you know all of our conceptions of the divine ar-ar-ar part of the are part of the apparatus of superstition which has passed down from from generation to generation and so another way of translating this and there were at least I don't know eight or nine other translations of their Ashima that existed prior to this authorized translation most of them not published or not available on the internet and there was one actually done by Marcia Gael herself who translated earlier that Seven Valleys in the four valleys and it's almost like a Fitzgerald II and translation I mean it has moments of sheer brilliance but just didn't track closely enough to the original to be used and her translation of this line I feel captures you know the Fitzgerald yeah and if it's Geraldine since the spirit of it better but it was a it couldn't be used in the translation so again the English translation goes behold the soul entrancing song behold the beating of the drum behold the sacred rhythms that from our hand are raining down the alternate translation by Marcia Gale here you from out Iraq the shout from out head jaws the singing air here ye God's hand as it drums out but God no other God is there unfortunately it drops the rainin down you know and you have to have rainin down at the end of every verse if you've decided that you're gonna you know faithfully translate Metis at it there's no way you can get raining down from this but it has this you can hear the drumbeat in it's like it's a really inspired translation maybe someday something something like this will be done where where there'll be a the ability to to render it in slight slightly more more loose terms but that captures the spirit and the and the beat of it so in the fifth in the fifth line tality lahu tbeen who da ha who t-beam java a na suti being as saturday amamiya's an pahala here is referencing three of the realms that he also references in the Seven Valleys it's the behold the everlasting face or the face of law hoot behold the chalice bearers charm or my did I skip did I skip sorry behold the countenance divine that's the countenance of lah hoot behold the maid of paradise and this the maid of heart and behold the grace upon the world jahve na suit which from our own presence is raining down it literally means Saturday amah it's from the secret of the cloud it's raining down and this referencing la whoo ha whoo nah suit rr3 of the of the five realms in traditional Sufi cosmology that that delineates the hierarchy the celestial hierarchy from the hahoo which is the realm of ha the letter H which is also associated with the divine essence because the letter H this particular letter H also begins the letter O V at which is the divine essence so the top level which is also the level of the a ma the invisible beyond the cloud is this the ha hoo and then the next level down is the lawsuit which is the realm of the manifestation and bahala refers to both of these here and then below that is the Java root and below that is the mallacoota which is translated as often time as the Dominion and as the kingdom when we talked about the kingdom of God it's always the mallacoota and then the lowest realm is the realm of na suit which is the realm of the world the grace upon the world this follows the ring stone symbol pretty much the ring some symbol has three tiers which captures ha hoot and la hoot and a na suit but then my low couch and Jabba do end up you know not being represented in the three tiers of the ring stone symbol but in another way the ring stone symbol captures the Trinity I'm it captures the you know the three aspects of the divine of the totally invisible and then the and then sort of the manifestation of the invisible and then well that's probably too too much of a simplification because the ring so symbol also has a vertical line which which which captures more of the Holy Spirit aspect of the Trinity so you have the Trinity is embedded in the ring stone symbol but then there's that extra tier of the of the world below so in the next in the next verse we're now on verse sixteen vadge hey a balky beam jja sake beam that pays oh ja g beam caz KO be a mommy tease ad or behold the everlasting face behold the chalice bearers charm behold the crystal draught that from our brimming cup is raining down this Cove is I have fun looking this up in the dictionary and it's and illustrate one of the challenges of the translator in the context here it's clear that Co bizza is a cup because it's surrounded by the metaphor of the wine and the chalice bearer and the but sometimes if you you know if you're not a if you're not lucky enough to be a native speaker and you have to go to the dictionary to find out what is this word sometimes the dictionary will send you in literally ten different directions at the same time so here's what Stein gasp says the possible definitions of coab an instrument with which anything is braid a mallet a beetle a Claude breaker a whip a scourge a drum formed of two kettles joined on their convex sides and covered with a skin played upon like a bagpipe a wave of the sea a vessel in which butter is separated from the milk the name of an edible plant so here it gets translated as our brimming cup the next line attache moves saw bean buys a bizarre bean scene a scene are being as cafe Sanaa midis at behold the fire of Moses obviously referring to the to the burning bush see his hand that shyness white referring to one of the miracles of Moses where God said take thy hand out of thy bosom and it was shining white and it was one of the miracles of Moses scene AAC now being behold the heart of Sinai from our hand all raining down so gorgeous imagery from the Old Testament in this in this verse nollie a mast on beam howl at a boast on beam jazz bay a hast on beam as satin ela call me reason hear ye the soldered lover's size or the drunken lovers sighs behold the garden blooming fare behold the Bliss that from his presence in your midst is raining down and here the garden blooming ferret's it's a lovely translation of ha lot a boast on a halt in Sufi terms is it is it an ecstatic state so the this it's an attempt of but it's the it's the hot seat at the ecstasy of the garden behold the Bliss of jazz be Hostin it's really the bliss of haast on its you know it's the bliss of true existence which from his presence in your midst casts on a la comida sad which from the courtyard of the Divine Presence is raining down in the next verse KO njaa haw a bean Tara's a ball eben Renee a or nos dejó Ibanez quelques bhajami reason behold the radiant face of ha behold the beauteous robe of ba behold the lordly grace that from our pen is raining down this also captures something no way of rendering this in English but this this glow and je a ha e of glowing J is a is a rosebud if I'm not if I'm not mistaken and the rosebud of ha well what does that mean the letter ha in persian actually looks like a miniature rosebud it's a it's a little when I wish I had a I think of it as like a circle with a little loop inside but you can imagine is it so he's he's describing this the rosebud of hai saying look at that and then this tattoos AE a ba e is the it was translated as beauteous robes of ba but Titus is more more generally an adornment and it also could imply like the tresses again referring to Bahamas hair and the curve and as he and his curling hair so it also could be referring to the letter ba so that ties a BA II is also the lock of the letter ba which looks like a lock of hair you know the the look of the letter B is a curling lock so he's referring but then of course at the same time he's referring to the ha and the ba which is you know two letters of his own name so it's another way of referring to his own his own divine station and then behold the lordly grace' from our pen is raining down in Rafa T's version it says ran a fall II or the song of fall which again is the song of Persia but in another in another manuscript it said it's Naza de ha e which is which is slightly different and so there are slightly different versions actually of the Raja ma in in different manuscripts which probably cannot all be attributed to scribal error and it's quite possible that bahala himself over the over the course of his ministry tweaked it a little bit or made made small revisions to it over the course of the years which was also the case in other tablets that he wrote the Sri Akal is a particular example where Mahalo would later revised one of his own works later on for different to suit different purposes in the and then the final verse tuff is a hoot a Steen Rajah - who - Dean and NATO you DAST Inc as a Nathan ah Metis ad and here's just it's almost like exclamation points it sounds like in the Persian he's saying the vessel and it was translated quite directly in English the vessel of the Advent this the clouds of limpid waters these the trill of song birds this from our fleeting wellspring raining down and here the fleeting wellspring is the a a phenom and the aim is that is the wellspring fan ah is the state of mystical annihilation which is the seventh of the seven valleys which will be the next the next tablet we look at starting next week and the uttermost end of the mystical journey in the Seven Valleys we'll find that there are stages beyond that is the stage of fan ah the stage of annihilation in which the ego the egocentric self is burned away and nothing remains of the self so it's appropriate that bahá'u'lláh you know ends you know with all of these verses alluding to his own station as source of the of the Holy Spirit as source of the divine bounties which are flowing into the world he also he ends with this note of humility and nothingness it's from this that's almost paradoxically you know he's the source and he's also nothingness which is no paradox at all when you think of the when you think of the of the profit as a channel as a hollow Reed from which the pith of self has been entirely blown out so that it's able to sound those pure tones of the of the breath that's breathed through it in that sense the personality is has been has been blown out and which is that state that spiritual state of fan aw and it's only through attaining that state that one is able to resound with the mystical music and the mystical tones of the spirit so so that's the that's that's one attempt at looking a little bit at the terminology behind the Raja ma and getting a sense of there being quite a few extra extra layers behind it and as you can see it's it's not just for the for the sense of the of the divine that it gives you know the immediate sense of yeah what where else in history do we have of a prophet actually describing what it was like to receive the revelation that then you know sparked the their entire prophetic mission you know this was the event that Bahá’u’lláh concealed for for a decade that later he announced in his declaration in Baghdad in 1863 and we have this very intimate portrayal of the of the inner experience of it but we also have this you almost preview of themes that were to occupy his revelation not the social teachings but the mystical theological themes that are central to his to his later mission are all just about all at least touched upon in these in these few lines of the of the rationale ah so so that's that's all I had any thoughts or reactions on this set no we don't know probably we don't we don't we can't say but in most cases when a tablet was revealed in honor of a particular person one normally knows because they're referenced you know in the opening or something like that with this we we don't know probably not there are a number of other poems of that baha'u'llah wrote this only the first of a collection maybe a dozen or so one or two dozen poems that b'hala revealed all in the early years never a NACA period ball of the Baghdad period and as far as I know they are also not addressed to particular people but they're just you know cast into the world and how did they come together well the same way all of his writings came together they were preserved and maybe that's why we have less of his writings preserved from this period because a lot of people didn't know who he was so they might not have thought oh this worth keeping and treasuring and in becoming a family heirloom as was the case with his later writings but I think early on they they were copied and preserved the rashanna itself actually exists in the hand of there's a manuscript in the hand of baha'u'llah that records the entirety of the of the poem and it's from before Adrianople because his hand is not shaking you can always you can date b'hala at least to Adrianople when he was poisoned and subsequently his hand had a characteristic tremor to it that you could that's very identifiable in in his manuscripts and prior to that his writing is also quite identifiable but without the tremor and there's there's a manuscript that is early you know probably Baghdad period and so bahala himself was either re copying this one wonder is you know how when it was revealed in the CH all did he have paper and pencil on hand you're probably not given what we understand of the conditions and so it would if it would have been written down it's at some time at some point later and share it among among the friends but that's we don't have a lot of information about that oh maybe but since he also remember mentions had jaws and never went to hit jaws I mean it's not unnecessary Arabic and Persian yeah it also may refer to Arabic and Persian although Iraq you know Arabic today has spoken in Iraq when you refer to Araki in this context it may also refer to the to the to the two languages I'm not sure yes is he was is literally in chains and stocks and so it would have been impossible for him to to write so this would have been memorized in and then written down later yeah all right well we'll continue next week not not what's quite the intensity of reference to the original but we'll go through the seven values I think it was fairly deep dive you know at least a valley a week I suppose at a maximum maximum rate of one Valley a week because there's so many more tablets after that easy yeah oh is it oh right oh well I'll send you an email that's possible yeah that's possible I'll have to consult Central Command Center all about that because hyper western review of the Persian didn't work and when I hear the poetry that's in there it does not sound like Western poetry right because Plus fashions change I mean it was more fashionable a couple centuries ago to try to write English poetry in rhymed verse and it's a lot less fashionable today and when you look at most poetry that's written today it's not rhymed you know it's almost thought of as trite you know yes yeah and a lot of the rhyme is internal I pointed out a couple of instances but yeah it's it's not a direct because the languages are different in histories are different it's not a direct translation yeah that also makes it impossible to yeah it's almost everywhere it is Arabic they resonate a lot of to me a lot of we needlessly peace is that there's these other references other image to come up in your mind because it's referring to something very particular right now we're listening to television series it's in Spanish and there's all these references to Spanish history I don't know so there's clearly some things that are missing in their little jokes and so on because I don't have that background so you can give that well it's referring to this in this and this you can kind of get a little bit more of that imagery that's part of the poetry as well it's definitely Bahamas style beyond that now most Persian Sufi poetry would yeah we would not have so much Arabic but how a lot really stacks it stacks his writings with Arabic even even as non poems his persian writings in general have a very high percentage of Arabic well yeah Bahá’u’lláh has yet comments about the Tunisia he comments about the sweetness of the Persian but the power of the Arabic and the and the eloquence and the precision of the Arabic and both of them are necessary in his you know in his role as prophet you know he's conveying music at the same time he is at times wanting to convey something precise and powerful and and with and so he needs both the Arabic and the Persian I don't know why he mixes so much Arabic words into the Persian perhaps it's - it's to give it that extra sort of the sort of Quranic connotations of it elevates it into into non everyday Persian well his audience know his audience but his audience would have known Arabic because you know at the time learning the Quran was the foundation of school and it's still to some extent today although less so and so I think the understanding Arabic was more prevalent than even that it is today and so the issues that modern-day persians have in reading raja are greater than they would have been when it was revealed a century and a half ago majesty yeah putting it and at the level of the wing we soar thank you do you want to hear it kind of pretty an actual 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