Disqus - Latest Comments for RonPrice

Re: పురిటి దుఃఖం - కాశి రాజు

RonPrice — Thu, 28 Aug 2014 23:40:12 -0000

For those who post in a language other than English, as has been the case for several months now, I've decided to make a personal policy not to respond since I have no idea what is being said.-Ron price, Tasmania

Re: M.నారాయణ శర్మ గారి విశ్లేషణ

RonPrice — Fri, 22 Aug 2014 01:19:42 -0000

Another post completely incomprehensible to me.-Ron

Re: పురిటి దుఃఖం - కాశి రాజు

RonPrice — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 21:02:40 -0000

This is yet another post that I am unable to decipher.-Ron

Re: పురిటి దుఃఖం - కాశి రాజు

RonPrice — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 08:51:12 -0000

I'm sorry but I have no idea what this post is all about, Kasi. -Ron

Re: Gallery Teeram

RonPrice — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 21:45:23 -0000

I thank you for your comment, Krishna, but I am not proactive at this site.-Ron Price, Australia

Re: DEMO

RonPrice — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 03:49:22 -0000

Thanks for the explanation, Ramya; now I understand why the Latin is found above.-Ron Price, Australia

Re: Teeram.com

RonPrice — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 01:25:09 -0000

I have not taken much interest in furniture over my 70 years of living.

Re: DEMO

RonPrice — Wed, 06 Aug 2014 01:20:43 -0000

I find it impossible to comment on the above post since it is written in Latin.

Re: Erich Fromm, the Sane Society and the Baha’i Faith

RonPrice — Sat, 31 May 2014 01:18:29 -0000

I put together the following series of paragraphs, prose and prose-poetry, a few weeks before my 70th birthday, to express some of my understanding of, and appreciation for, Erich Fromm. I post those paragraphs and poetry below as a response to Jack McLean's views expressed above. I also want to take this opportunity, as an old friend of Jack's, to wish him well in his personal and professional life. He and I attended Baha'i firesides together in Toronto Ontario back in the early 1960s, before he went to the Sorbonne, and before I went to McMaster, and before life called us, & we called it, along different paths in the spiritual & intellectual garden that is the Baha'i Faith.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania, Australia
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Part 1:

Erich Fromm(1900-1980) was a theorist who brought other theories together. He also emphasized how one's personality is embedded in class, status, education, vocation, and religious and philosophical background, among other social determinants. Fromm held the view that humans need to live and feel part of a genuine community for this community functions to change the people in it. In some ways I have often thought that the Baha'i Faith is going to operate inversely, if that is the right word, to Christianity. Christianity tried to change the society, and it did, by changing the individual; whereas the Baha'i Faith, as it progresses into future centuries, will change individuals by changing society. Of course, this dichotomy is not a simple one, but contains within it much nuance and complexity.

Fromm was a medical doctor and practicing psychiatrist; he explained people's drives in terms of their social interaction, their life in community. Mental illness was thus explained in terms of the failure of the individual to relate properly with other individuals. The role of biological and genetic determinants in mental health problems and individual behavior was not part of his focus, although it has become part of mine as I look back over seven decades of living.

Since my autobiography and my personality is embedded to a great extent in the same factors that Fromm describes and, since I have come to the view that this same autobiography and personality is also a result of biological and genetic factors, it is timely to say a few words about Erich Fromm's ideas in this prose-poetic.

Part 1.1:

Erich Fromm is known not only as an author and significant humanist of the 20th century, but also as a psychoanalyst and social psychologist. Erich Fromm affected the world like almost no other German-born social scientist. His writings and realizations are read and recognized worldwide. The International Erich Fromm Society now works to maintain, to research, to develop further, and to pass on Erich Fromm’s scholarly findings and ideas as the fitting continuation of his international work and in recognition of his worldwide significance. It has been more than 50 years since I first began reading Erich Fromm, and I thank Jack McLean for reminding me of Fromm's 1955 book Sane Society which I also reading in my five tumultuous years of post-secondary education.

The year I began my pioneering experience, 1962 at the age of 18, Erich Fromm, American psychoanalyst and prolific writer in the field of
existential psychology, stated his 'credo' in his book "Beyond the Chains of Illusions." I have written some of his Credo below since it was consistent with my views back in 1962 and it still is. I have commented on some of his Credo expressing views, as that Credo did, that have remained part of my belief system during this lifelong travelling-and-pioneering venture spanning, as it does now, more than fifty years. I read Fromm's books for thirty years, from the 1960s through the 1990s.-Ron Price with thanks to Michael Maccoby, "The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: The Prophetic and the Analytic," Society, July/August 1994.

Part 2:

"The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he has been born." Given this fact, my role as a Baha'i has been to spend my life trying to build the kind of society fit for human beings to be born into. For, as Fromm says in his Credo, "society has both a furthering and an inhibiting function. Only in cooperation with others, and in the process of work, does man develop his powers, only in the historical process do humans create themselves." Fromm continues:

"Only when society's aim will have become identical with the aims of humanity will society cease to cripple man and to further evil." In attempting to transform society Fromm underestimated, it seems to me, the need for individuals to adapt to their society. For the Baha'i to be an effective teacher, propagator, and disseminater, of the values and beliefs, attitudes and norms, of this micro, this new, society which he or she is associated with, he needs to adapt to the larger, the macro, society in which he has been born and in which he lives his life. Many of the difficulties I had in my decade-long travelling-and-pioneering experience came, it seems to me in retrospect, from what was my slow adaptation to my society. As the decades followed one another though, with great speed it now seems in retrospect, my increasing effectiveness was due significantly to my more efficient adapting to my society.

Part 3:

This adaptive process is slow and arduous work and, for Baha'is, it takes place in the context of action toward goals using a map provided by the Founders of their religion and the legitimate Successors. "I believe that every man represents humanity. We are different as to intelligence, health and talents. Yet we are all one. We are all saints and sinners, adults and children, and no one is anybody's superior or judge. We have all been awakened with the Buddha, we have all been crucified with Christ, and we have all killed
and robbed with Genghis Khan, Stalin, and Hitler. Man's task in life is precisely the paradoxical one of realizing his individuality and at the same time transcending it and arriving at the experience of universality. Only the fully developed individual self can drop the ego." Perhaps this is one way of defining, of interpreting, the nature and experience of 'Abdu'l-Baha and some of the reasons for His effectiveness and efficiency in what were some very difficult communities in which He lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. -Ron Price, Pioneeering Over Four Epochs, 9 October 2002.

Part 4:

There is much truth here, Erich, and
I must thank you for your wonderful
and illuminating books, enriching(1)
as they did my life, & approximating
the jeweled wisdom of this lucid Faith,
a Faith that I set out with in '62 when I
moved to Dundas and began to pray
in those back streets on afternoons in
the small town to which I had moved,
to read from sweet-scented streams,
taste of the fruits of His tree in years
when my father's white hair blew in the
wind for the last time, my mother was
driven to the end of her tether, & that
charisma became institutionalized at
the apex of this wondrous, new Order.

(1) Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusions, Simon and Schuster, NY, 1962, pp.174-182, and many other books to his last, published posthumously, in 1994.

Ron Price
9/10/'02 to 31/5/'14.

Part 4.1:

Freud’s life’s work had been devoted to understanding as fully as possible the world of man’s soul. To Freud psyche and soul were the same, conscious and unconscious mental life, although this subject is complex and highly nuanced. Psychoanalysis is the science of the soul. -Ron Price with thanks to Erich Fromm, The Art of Listening, Constable, London, 1994, p.75.

Part 5:

In the 15 August 2013 issue of The New York Review of Books Alan Ryan, in his article "The Art of Being Erich Fromm", he reviews a new book entitled: The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet by Lawrence J. Friedman(Columbia University Press,410 pages). Friedman begins his review as follows: "Some readers will recall being given a copy of Erich Fromm’s popular The Art of Loving in high school or college, usually remembering it with gratitude, but sometimes with a sense that its reliance on the ideas of Freud and Marx now makes it not only unfashionable, but old-fashioned." I was not given this book, but I read it while at university in the years 1963 to 1967.

"Still others may recall their first reading of Escape from Freedom," continues Friedman, "one of the earlier attempts to explain what became known as the authoritarian personality: it was provoked by astonishment that so many otherwise rational people followed leaders such as Hitler, but it was much more wide-ranging in its exploration of the fear of freedom & the longing to be dependent." I had also read that book in those 4 years at two universities in Ontario.

"Still others may remember Fromm as a political activist, prominent in the antiwar movement from the early 1950s, and visible for the last time on the public stage as an adviser to Eugene McCarthy during his campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in
1967–1968." I was getting ready to teach Inuit kids at the time, and then recovering from teaching them back in those years. Erich Fromm was not on my horizons. But he kept coming back as the 1960s changed sensibly and insensibly into the 1970s, and then the 1980s and 1990s. Fromm will be with me, in one way or another, until I leave this mortal coil.

Re: Abbie Hoffman, a a was afflicted with Bipolar Disorder

RonPrice — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 08:09:38 -0000

TO A
DEGREE: JOHN NASH, SCHIZOPHRENIA AND BPD

All differences in
this world are of degree, and not of kind, because oneness is the secret of
everything.

Swami Vivekananda

Part 1:

For many people,
interaction with others provides most of what they require to find meaning and
significance in life.1 It is the place where virtually everyone meets
people, forms partnerships and marriage, raises children, and earns a living,
among a host of other activities. For others, ultimate and the most
significant of meanings are obtained from other sources.

Creative activity is
a particularly apt, indeed, highly rewarding way to express oneself. Creativity
is an activity that is often solitary, although group creativity is just as, or
even more, common in this modern age. The productions which result from
creativity are often regarded as possessing value to society but, of course,
not necessarily.

In my life,
beginning as it did in the 1940s, solitariness has been unavoidable and
essential in one way or another, and so has human interaction. After more than
fifty years of extensive interaction (1949-1999), I had come to the point in my
lifespan where my employment, my interaction with others, and my health were
causing me to feel an immense weariness, a certain tedium vitae, to draw on an
old Latin phrase.

In the last year
before I took an early retirement at the age of 55, I even had to take shots of
testosterone to keep me going through my 15 hour days. Throughout the 1990s, as
I headed into my final years of work as a teacher and lecturer, I increasingly
felt the need for the solitary. I was moving, by sensible and insensible
degrees, into a period in my life which I wanted to be characterized by a
dominance of the solitary. I also wanted to write.

Part 2:

After some forty
years of travelling-and-pioneering from place to place, and job to job, from
one house to another, from one relationship to another, from deep and
meaningful relationships to trivial, routine and difficult relationships, the
time to finally stay in one place and, at the same time, to decrease the
quantity of interaction with others seemed to have arrived. I was not
entirely sure but, at the age of 55, I took a sea-change, moved to a little
town where that human interaction would be minimal, and I could get off what
had become life’s old treadmill for 60 to 80 hours a week. I could cease my
work in life’s several salt mines, so to speak. I wanted--as I say--to write and,
gradually in the next decade, from 1999 to 2009, when I went on an old-age
pension, I reinvented myself as: a writer and author, poet and publisher,
editor and researcher, reader and scholar, online blogger and journalist.
As I write this in 2013, I now have millions of readers in cyberspace.

Back in the late
1990s I wanted, like Robert Redford, “to be a private man doing his own thing
in a remote place.”2 Like Robert Redford, too, I had had trouble
attaining this dominance of the solitary. Now, though, after seven years of
retirement from: FT, PT and most volunteer work, 2007 to 2013, I have finally
found that privacy, that remoteness and that solitary life.-Ron Price with
thanks to: 1Sylvia Nasar, A
Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Nash, Simon and Schuster, NY, 1998,
p.15; 2Minty Clinch, Robert
Redford,
New English Library, London, 1989, p.3.

There were always
skads of people around

back then in ’49, in
‘59, & again, and again.

They were
unavoidable, essential to my way

of life. I accepted them
like the air; they’d

always been there.
And it stayed that way,

in one way or
another, until just the other day

when it became just
me and my wife,1 a couple

of shopkeepers, my
son and my step-daughter

dropping in, many
good-byes to the Baha’is,

lunch or dinner with
friends: the quiet life at

last, at long last,
much the same as it had once

been long ago during
those first memories….2

Getting closer to
solitude, but never really

there, probably
never really attainable, not

totally, for this
commitment, this vision, is

all part of what
Holley called: ‘this social

religion’ and social
it is, with solitariness

only really
desireable to a degree, a degree.3

Ron Price

26/6/’99 to
16/10/’13.

1 My son moved out
of home about the same time that I had given-up all FT and PT work, about 2004
at the age of 60. My wife and I were alone for the first time in our
marriage, with an empty nest, since our relationship had begun back in about
April 1974. Between the first draft of this prose-poem in 1999, and its last
last in 2013, my son married and he and his wife had a daughter. One of my
step-daughters also had a child, and these new arrangements brought
grandchildren into our lives. My second step-daughter also became a greater
part of our lives.

2 My first memory
goes back to about 1947 or 1948 when I was an only child of older parents and
my personal life was relatively solitary.

3 I have been
associated with the Baha’i Faith now for 60 years, and this world religion, and
its highly social emphasis, brings me even now in touch with people on a daily
basis in one way or another. I keep this interaction, as the age of 70
approaches in the next nine months, to about one hour a day on average, not
counting the time with my wife.

PREAMBLE:

The year before I retired
from FT employment as a teacher and lecturer, Sylvia Nasar published, with
Simon and Schuster, A
Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Nash. This week I watched the film that
was based on this book and its subsequent screenplay. I place the following prose-poem
below and following, as it does, the above piece on the nature of the
social-solitary continuum in my lifespan because the content of this prose-poem
also draws on that same biography of John Nash.

__________________________________________________________

Section 1:

A Beautiful Mind is a 2001 American biographical drama film based on the life of John Nash(1928- ), an American mathematician who won the Nobel Laureate in Economics in 1994, the year I began to eye my retirement from a half century of life as a student-and-teacher. I won’t tell you about the film’s director or producer, its actors and the awards that the film won, or the money it grossed. You can read all that on the internet, if you are interested.

The story, the film, begins in the early years of a young prodigy, John Nash, who arrives at Princeton university as a graduate student in 1947. Early in the film, in 1959 in fact, Nash begins developing paranoid schizophrenia. That was a big year for me; I was 15 in 1959, and the home-run king in a little town in a region of
Ontario known as the Golden Horseshoe. That same year I also joined a Faith
that claimed to be the latest of the Abrahamic religions.(1)

Nash endured
delusional episodes while painfully watching the loss, and the burden his
condition brings on his wife and friends. He went in and out of psychiatric
hospitals until 1970, as I was planning to come to Australia from my home in
Canada and work in the city of Whyalla in the state of South Australia as a
primary school teacher. The film ends with Nash receiving the Nobel Prize in
1994.

Like most
biographical drama, the film takes considerable literary or poetic license with
the story. It is the same with historical fiction. If people want more accuracy
in the lives of those about whom personal drama and bio-pics are made, they
have to go to biography; even then biographers have a certain stance, a certain
take, on the person concerned. That is why some critics of the genre say that a
true biography can never be written.

Section 2:

In 2002 PBS produced
a documentary about Nash entitled A Brilliant Madness which tells the story of the
mathematical genius whose career was cut short by severe mental health
problems. In Nash’s own words, he states:″I spent periods of five to eight
months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always
attempting a legal argument for release. It happened that, when I had been
hospitalized long enough, I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses. I
would revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional
circumstances. I would then return to mathematical research. In these
interludes of, as it were, enforced rationality, I did succeed in doing some
respectable mathematical research.”(2)

I took a special
interest in this film because I suffered, during my seven decades in the
lifespan, from several mental health issues beginning with a mild
schizo-affective disorder and, then, bipolar 1 disorder. In the 200 page
overview of my experience I mention several other mental health problems that I
have had to deal with.(3) -Ron Price with thanks to: (1)The Baha’i Faith, (2)Wikipedia, 16/10/’13, and (3)Ron Price, 70 Years of A Chaos Narrative now located at several mental
health sites.

Section 3:

Our auditory
hallucinations

were on the same
spectrum,

but yours lasted
much longer

than mine with or
without the

medications…I only
got hit in

two episodes, but
ECTs and

medications sorted
me out; &

problems with what
is called

compliance were not
as bad in

my case. I thought
that the film

could have been more
accurate

in its handling of
the treatment

for paranoid
schizophrenia; the

film’s use of the
insulin shock

therapy frightened
the pants off

of the millions in
the population

who saw the film,
gave psychiatry

yet another
pejorative pubic-image,

and discouraged
people with mental

health disorders:
schizophrenia, BPD,

and other mental
health sufferers from

taking
medication….thus simplifying

what is a very
complex health problem.

Ron Price

16/10/’13.

Re: Abbie Hoffman, a a was afflicted with Bipolar Disorder

RonPrice — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 08:08:11 -0000

You can Google my story at "RonPrice BPD"

Re: Keep Calm and Ruhi On – Thoughts on the Frontiers of Learning Video

RonPrice — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 09:41:39 -0000

Here is an abstract in two parts, Baquia:

Part 1:

This book of 550 pages(font 14) and 230 thousand words contains reflections and understandings regarding this new Bahá'í culture of learning and growth, what amounts to a paradigmatic shift, in the Baha’i community which it has been going through since the mid-1990s. This newest, this latest, of the Abrahamic religions, has been developing a new culture in the last two decades, from 1996 to 2016. This new culture or paradigm will be developing in the decades ahead at least until 2044, the end of the second century of the Bahá'í Era(1844 to 2044), and perhaps beyond into that third century, 2044 to 2144. Time will tell when the next paradigmatic shift will take place in the international Bahá'í community.

Comparisons and contrasts are made to several previous paradigm shifts in the Bahá'í community. Thoughts on future developments within this paradigm and future paradigms are suggested. In the first six years, 2007 to 2013, of the presence of this book, this commentary, on the world-wide-web, this work has contributed to an extensive dialogue on the issues regarding the many related and inter-related processes involved in the many ongoing changes in the international Bahai community, a community which exists in more than 200 countries and territories, and more than 120,000 localities, across the planet.

Part 2:

The Baha’i community had already put in place, through the guidance of its leadership over more than a century-and-a-half, through prayer and meditation, through sacrifice and suffering, and through much else, an evolving structural base for community building. During those decades, filled as they were from the 1850s to the 1990s with a rapidly expanding population, with appalling suffering across the face of the earth, and with unparalleled scientific and technological change, the Bahá'í Faith spread to every corner of the planet and forged its Bahá'í administration in many thousands of localities.

The latest of the Abrahamic religions, which is what this new Faith claims to be, entered the 21st century with a structural-base that could be called embryonic, having been in what you might call the chrysalis phase, a century before, in 1900. The community-building that has been taking-place in the last two decades, 1996 to 2016, has been built on this structure, and on the work of several million adherents in the Bahá'í community. Bahá'í institutions and the millions of individuals who have been part of its tapestry over more than 150 years before the emergence of this new paradigm have a story that I encourage readers to become as familiar with as they possibly can. This new religion has grown up in the light of modern history and there is much to study, in some ways, far too much for any of us to really take in to its fullest. We can but try and, hopefully, we have the interest and the discipline to make the effort and avoid the massive distractions that beset us all in this new digital age of print and image-glut.

If readers just read the headings and sub-headings of this book, they will get the core of factual material.-Ron Price, Australia

Re: Keep Calm and Ruhi On – Thoughts on the Frontiers of Learning Video

RonPrice — Wed, 29 May 2013 10:06:04 -0000

For an online 550 page book which integrates the May 2013 document from
the ITC, and the Ridvan message of 2013 from the House of Justice, into
an analysis of the Baha'i culture of learning as it has developed over
the last two decades, go to this link:
http://bahai-library.com/pr...

Re: As Robert Was Saying

RonPrice — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 17:27:56 -0000

He introduces this poem, titled The Language of There, with a
quote from James Merrill:

I mean to learn, in the language of where I am going,
barely enough to ask for food and love.
- James Merrill

Yes. There, light will be our language,
a tongue without words for
perhaps, or arid, or futile,
though shadow will be retained
that we may contrast the radiance.
Almost will no longer be a measure.
We will learn a hundred synonyms for certitude,
and love will have a thousand conjugations.
Ours will be the italicised vocabulary
of delectable astonishments.
The possessive case will play no part
in the grammar of joy and burgeoning,
infants will speak at birth, and only the ancients
will remember the obscenity exile.
There, laughter will be spelt in capitals,
sadness grow obsolete,
and negation be declared archaic.
Hell will be pronounced remoteness,
and vast tomes will be devoted
to the derivations of yes.
Where all is elation and surprise
exclamation points will fall into disuse.
There, food and affection will be ours for a smile,
and immortality for a fluent, knowing wink.
In time, our desire to speak will abandon us.
All that need be said the light will say. Yes.
----------------------------------------------------

Re: As Robert Was Saying

RonPrice — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 17:21:15 -0000

I enjoyed this interview, Robert, as I have enjoyed your writing and
your presence on the TV and radio. You might like this poem which
follows in my next post concerned as it is with death.-Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania

Re: Poetry and Utopia by Charles Simic | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books

RonPrice — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 00:03:09 -0000

As the paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin once said in his book The Future of Mankind(1955): "The more we
ponder these matters of the future the more must we realize that, scientifically
speaking, the real difficulty presented by Man is not the problem of
whether he is a center of constant progress: it is far more the question
of how long this progress can continue, at the speed at which it is
going, without Life blowing up upon itself or causing the earth on which
it was horn to explode. Our modern world was created in less than
10,000 years, and in the past 200 years it has changed more than in all
the preceding millennia. Have we ever thought of what our planet may be
like, psychologically, in a million years’ time? It is finally the
Utopians, not the ‘realists’, who make scientific sense. They at least,
though their flights of fancy may cause us to smile, have a feeling for
the true dimensions of the phenomenon of Man.

Re: Time for Ruhi to Show Us the Money: Part I

RonPrice — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 06:34:45 -0000

I posted an introduction to the paradigmatic shift in the Baha'i community, the new culture of learning and growth that is at the heart of this paradigm, nearly three years ago. I did this posting at several internet sites and have updated/revised that post in these last two-and-a-half years. It seemed like a good idea to give readers some specific steps on how to access this now revised article, what is now a book of 160,000 words and 350 pages at Baha’i Library Online(BLO). The Association for Bahá’í Studies New Zealand in 2007 launched its open access, internationally oriented, peer reviewed electronic periodical OJBS: Online Journal of Bahá’í Studies, but in January 2009 that initiative was discontinued. One of its first issues would have been devoted to an exploration of this new paradigm.

In the time this book has been on the internet there have been many thousand views of this analysis, this statement on the new paradigm at the few sites where it has been posted. In addition to googling "Baha'i Culture of Learning and Growth" and accessing this article in the process at several internet sites, readers can find this piece of writing at BLO by clicking on the following:

http://bahai-library.org/fi...
------------------
Readers can also access the latest edition of this article at BLO by taking the following steps: (i) type Baha’i Library Online or Baha’i Academics Resource Library into your search engine; (ii) click on the small box “By author” at the top of the access page at BLO; (iii) type “Price” into the small box that then appears and click on the word “Go;” and then (iv) scroll down to article/document item #47 and (v) click on that item and read to your heart’s content. When your eyes and your mind start to glaze over, stop reading. The article can be downloaded free and you will then have access to a revised article, a 350 page, 160,000 word context for all this new paradigmatic terminology that has come into the Baha’i community in the last 15 years.

The statement is a personal one, does not assume an adversarial attitude, attempts to give birth of as fine an etiquette of expression as I can muster and, I like to think, possesses both candour and critical thought on the one hand and praise and delight at the process on the other. I invite readers to what I also like to think is “a context on which relevant fundamental questions” regarding this new paradigm may be discussed within the Baha’i community. It is also my intention to update this article in the months and years ahead. One of the advantages of the BLO site is the freedom it gives to a writer to update the article right on the site in an ongoing process as new insights from major thinkers in the Baha'i community and information from the elected and appointed institutions of the Cause comes to hand.

If time and the inclination permit, check it out. No worries, no obligation, just if it interests you. You may find the piece of writing too long as I'm sure many readers do. It is certainly a view from the inside. We each have a different experience on the inside of a paradigm, on the inside of this Faith or, indeed, living on the inside of our global society. You may also find this too personal due to the fact that I attempt to answer the question: “where do I fit into this new paradigm?” After a few paragraphs of reading, you will get the flavour of the exercise. Just keep reading if your mind and spirit are enjoying the process.

Re: Roger White: Applesauce

RonPrice — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 02:19:40 -0000

Roger White was considered "the unofficial poet laureate" back in the 1980s and into the 1990s before he died in 1993. The Baha'i community at the international level has not had an official poet laureate, as far as I know.
-------SOME COMMENTS ON A POETRY READING ROGER GAVE----------
---LIPSTICK AND BRUISES----
--------------------------------------------------------------
My book on Roger White is devoted primarily to his poetry, but I have also added special chapters to focus on a small selection of his letters, on his books of prose and in one chapter on some of his other activities involving writing and poetry. I have done this to place his poetry in additional perspectives, those of a creative and imaginative life.

In a book celebrating the first hundred years of Hansard in Canada's parliament, John Ward wrote that Roger White was "acknowledged by his colleagues as one of the finest shorthand writers ever to serve his country." He also served as the official reporter for the Supreme Court of British Columbia. These were some of the skills White brought to the Publishing Department at the Baha'i World Centre where he was editor-in-chief of several volumes of The Baha'i World in the 1980s. He wrote the lyrics for 'Songs for Solo Voice' by Jean South in Luxembourg and the text of a book Forever in Bloom: The Lotus of Bahapur. I am confident White had many other talents and abilities that are not mentioned in this book, devoted as it is to a study of White's poetry not his life's activites.

In 1989 White gave a poetry reading in Haifa. He had been at the Baha'i World Centre for eighteen years by that time. The evening's program was called 'Lipstick and Bruises.' The tone was entertaining with a gentle satire in the air as he read and spoke. White was a sit-down, not a stand-up, comedian. He really was quite funny, not a surprising quality to anyone who knew his poetry and had received some of his letters. White satirized almost everything that the Baha'i World stood for but, in the end, everything and everyone's emotions and standards were left intact. His was a gentle voice, although I have come across many in the last thirty years who found his poetry far from gentle and far too difficult for their literary tastes.

Many really successful contemporary comedians who have gained popularity, at least in the last half century, leave not a stone or an institution standing after a thoroughgoing evening of satirical work is done. Not so with White. He certainly turned stones over with his satire but the process was gentle and embodied an etiquette, a refinement, of expression.

I was reminded, as I listened, of the Jews who for centuries have been 'the funny guys,' the comedians. There seems to be something about suffering that brings out the lighter side of life as a survival mechanism. It seemed most fitting that two hundred Baha'is should join White in an evening of laughter and pure delight. Somehow it was a sign of the maturity of the Baha'i community, so often measured in blood, sweat and tears, dogged persistence in the face of massive indifference and a faith which it was their hope and belief would move mountains, if not tomorrow, then over the centuries. One way of characterizing the Baha'i experience, White's experience, perhaps, was with, as White put it in the title he gave to the program, 'Lipstick and Bruises.'

White read many of his old favourites and the audience's. He also read some new material: from letters he had received, from his experiences and those of others. He joked; he played the raconteur, the provocateur, the stimulator, the titillator, the poet-who-lived-there, the kind man that he was.

I was not present at the evening's entertainment which was organized, White informed us, by the Department of Organization and Personnel. I was one of those who received a cassette-tape with the background music of the Iranian musician Masoud Rowshan who played the santour. I was one of those who heard the voice of the poet, I think for the first time, after enjoying his many voices in poetry.

There was a dryness in his voice, a little like the dry humour that comes out of Canada. But there was that kindness, the kindness that 'Abdu'l-Baha had pointed to when He visited Canada in 1912. White was one of those 'kind friends' that 'Abdu'l-Baha had raised up just about the time when Canada was forming its first National Spiritual Assembly in 1948. With a lifetime of service, over forty years, and the experiences of lipstick and bruises behind him, White was a veteran. He was also greatly loved. There would be four years of 'lipstick and bruises' to go before his innings were to be completed.

I wish I could have been there, although I was able to savour each line as it came off my cassette tape. I felt as if I finally had White to myself after all these years, such are the illusions of technology. Nineteen months after this poetry reading White would leave the Baha'i World Centre. With a quadruple bypass operation under his belt, so to speak, which he likened to "being struck down by a herd of stampeding rogue elephants or perhaps a small Sherman tank," he still had a little left. He put that little into three books of poetry which were published within three years of this public reading at the Baha'i World Centre.
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One of the ways award-winning Inder Manocha handles hecklers when he is onstage doing stand-up comedy is this response: "Sir, if I embarrass you it's called comedy. If you embarrass me it's racism." The retort works because of Mr. Manocha's diverse heritage - and its play on political correctness. This stand-up commedian is very different than Roger White.
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Then there is: Eslam Anthony Shams is an Iranian-American comedian and successful actor. His comedy routine switches between English and Farsi and he's got some harsh words for those Iranians in America who go to his shows and don't enjoy the 40% of it that's in English.
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And on and on one could go in this vein of contemporary humour, but I have said far too much here for threads that usually have shorter posts.-Ron Price, Tasmania

Re: National Spiritual Assembly (United States) Letter – April 8, 2007

RonPrice — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 05:01:18 -0000

Try this simple link---with thanks to fubar:

http://bahai-library.org/fi...

Re: National Spiritual Assembly (United States) Letter – April 8, 2007

RonPrice — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:44:45 -0000

Don't click on http://www.new.facebook.com... ... 134&ref=mf...as I advised above. I just tried it and it will not give you the result I had anticipated it would. And so readers can access the latest edition of this article at BLO by taking the steps as I advised above, namely: (i) type Baha’i Library Online or Baha’i Academics Resource Library into your search engine; (ii) click on the small box “By author” at the top of the access page at BLO; (iii) type “Price” into the small box that then appears and click on the word “Go;” and then (iv) scroll down to article/document item #46 and (v) click on that item and read to your heart’s content. When your eyes and your mind start to glaze over, stop reading. The article can be downloaded free and you will then have access to a revised article, a 210 page, 100,000 word context for all this new paradigmatic terminology that has come into the Baha’i community in the last 14 years.

Re: National Spiritual Assembly (United States) Letter – April 8, 2007

RonPrice — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 08:53:54 -0000

I posted an introduction to the paradigmatic shift in the Baha'i community, the new culture of learning and growth that is at the heart of this paradigm, some 24 months ago. I did this posting at several internet sites and have updated/revised that post in these last two years. It seemed like a good idea to give readers some specific steps on how to access this now revised article, what is now a book of 100,000 words and 210 pages, at Baha’i Library Online(BLO). The Association for Bahá’í Studies New Zealand in 2007 launched its open access, internationally oriented, peer reviewed electronic periodical OJBS: Online Journal of Bahá’í Studies, but in January 2009 that initiative was discontinued. One of its first issues would have been devoted to an exploration of this new paradigm.

In this two year period(10/07-10/09) there have been many thousand views of this analysis, this statement on the new paradigm at the few sites where it has been posted. In addition to googling "Baha'i Culture of Learning and Growth" and accessing this article in the process at several internet sites, readers can find this article at BLO by clicking on the following:
http://www.new.facebook.com/profile.php ... 134&ref=mf.

Readers can also access the latest edition of this article at BLO by taking the following steps: (i) type Baha’i Library Online or Baha’i Academics Resource Library into your search engine; (ii) click on the small box “By author” at the top of the access page at BLO; (iii) type “Price” into the small box that then appears and click on the word “Go;” and then (iv) scroll down to article/document item #46 and (v) click on that item and read to your heart’s content. When your eyes and your mind start to glaze over, stop reading. The article can be downloaded free and you will then have access to a revised article, a 210 page, 100,000 word context for all this new paradigmatic terminology that has come into the Baha’i community in the last 14 years.

The statement is a personal one, does not assume an adversarial attitude, attempts to give birth of as fine an etiquette of expression as I can muster and, I like to think, possesses both candour and critical thought on the one hand and praise and delight at the process on the other. I invite readers to what I also like to think is “a context on which relevant fundamental questions” regarding this new paradigm may be discussed within the Baha’i community. It is also my intention to update this article in the months and years ahead. One of the advantages of the BLO site is the freedom it gives to a writer to update the article right on the site in an ongoing process as new insights from major thinkers in the Baha'i community and information from the elected and appointed institutions of the Cause comes to hand.

If time and the inclination permit, check it out. No worries, no obligation, just if it interests you. You may find the piece of writing too long as I'm sure many readers do. You may also find it too personal due to the fact that I attempt to answer the question: “where do I fit into this new paradigm?” I do not raise the question: "what is wrong with this paradigm?" But I do give voice to the thrust of many of the criticisms that have been raised in the first 14 years(1996-2009) of its operation. After a few paragraphs of reading, you will get the flavour of the exercise. Just keep reading if your mind and spirit are enjoying the process.

Re: John McCain Ponders Sarah Palin Memoir - mediabistro.com: GalleyCat

RonPrice — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:33:27 -0000

SERENDIPITOUS SOCIOLOGY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY

We all grow old and live in a matrix of groups, networks, institutions and communities. This matrix is the substance of sociology. The student of sociology, even though sensitized to how a person’s life is embedded in groups, can be guilty of serious omissions and patterned distortions when he or she comes to write autobiography. The introspector and retrospector in sociological autobiography, though, can give us rare access to inner experience from their position of aloof detachment or passionate engagement.

Beginning with Herbert Spencer’s two volumes in 1904, sociology has left us very few intellectual autobiographies. Monopolistic access to my own inner life has found many grooves and at least one or two of these are found in my patterned distortions away from sociology toward religion. I hope the time has not yet come, as Virginia Woolf said it can, when I may have forgotten far more of significance than I can remember. Certainly I am far from the position Heinrich Boll, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature 1972, was in when he wrote that “not one title, not one author, not one book that I held in my hand has remained in my memory.”

The autobiographer is both the ultimate Insider and the ultimate Outsider in applying scientific understanding and insight to the self, the interplay of sequences of status-sets, roll-sets and intellectual development. What results is not so much a condensed description than a step toward elucidation.1 I feel as if I have just made a start in the first quarter-century(1984-2009) of my attempt at autobiography. After five decades(1963-2009) of dipping in and out of sociology I have become more than a little conscious of sociology’s hermeneutic influence as I go about writing my autobiography. Often when sociology’s influence did appear it was accidentally, serendipitously.

From my memoir emerges a picture of a Bahá'í, a man who was a teacher and lecturer for 35 years, a father, a husband, a pioneer for five decades who aims to provide as piercing an insight into his own life and times with as much muscular confidence that remained by his late middle age and the early years of his late adulthood as remained. He maintains as much etiquette of expression and diplomacy as he has been able to cultivate over his lifetime; along the way he takes no prisoners, writes sparingly about those who caused him discomfort in varying degrees. He makes little to no attempt to manufacture an image, although he sometimes feels indulgently avuncular as an author. Readers will learn something of the furies that screamed through his life until medications softened his edges by his sixties. These same readers will also learn something of the seraphic intimacy which he discovered along the way in many of life’s interstices.

I do not substantiate much of what I write with sources, with ferinstances. I would like to see my memoir published, but I think it unlikely in my lifetime. If I do publish a small selection for family and friends I would like the paper to be of superb quality and to have the paper feels simultaneously crispy and smooth to the touch. Sadly, such an edition would be far too expensive. In spite of the undeniable quality of such a set of volumes and what I like to think is a fascinating subject, the retail price would be far to high, undoubtedly exaggerated and too expensive for the average person. Hopefully, some publishing house will plan a paperback edition at a more attractive and affordable price!

A passing glance at what may become a large format book might lead readers to expect one of those high-calorie low-fibre coffee-table volumes. But this work is not of that ilk. It is a substantial series of tomes, some five of them now. It aims to carry a great deal of insight into which I have sunk a considerable burden of time and effort. Whether I achieve this for any one reader will be a result of some interplay between my words and that reader’s mind. This memoir’s down-side is that it is no easy read on the train or anywhere where said readers lacks space to spread their book. As I write these words I think my work is best read on the internet in bits and pieces. I have written millions of words on the internet and the time has not yet come to blow my cover, so to speak. To list the far-reaching teaching successes, the literary achievements, this effective Baha’i work and its consequent detail amazes me in these years when it has taken place, as I see it, within the new paradigm of learning and growth in the Bahá'í community.

It is important, too, that the font used, when this work is finally published, is neither too small nor too large. I have lovingly written these volumes and I would like to see them be a treat for readers, a real page-turner that they just can’t put down once they have started reading it. One can but hope. Perhaps if several clutches of photo-quality paper featuring a good number of colour plates and several full page plates advantageously exploiting the page size are included in some future published edition the result may be more marketable.

I would like to think that readers might be able to feel as if they are actually breathing the air, witnessing the action and hearing the voices of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people at the immense quantity of meetings I attended and conversations in which I took part during the four epochs that are the mise en scene of this work. Sadly, I think that readers will have to themselves do the juggling mentally and fill in much of the background situations by isolating my life and trying to integrate the material I provide about my community and my society as cogently as they can. Perhaps if some clever biographer uses facts from my seemingly less important diary and the many entries in my many-volumed work entitled Pionerring Over Four Epochs, he or she will provide readers with a much clearer understanding of the progression of activity that surrounded my life and my community in the last fifty years of the first century of the Formative Age of the Bahá'í Faith. My letters, essays and poetry might also be useful in this regard.

We live in an auto/biographical age that uses the personal narrative as a lens onto history and the contemporary world. In every medium, cultures are permeated and increasingly transformed by auto/biographical narratives, productions, and performances of identity. The proliferation of auto/biographical practices and the seriousness with which the academy is considering them testify to significant developments in this field. Auto/biography studies are firmly on the academic map in Canada and Australia. Auto/biographical genres now permeate such varied disciplines as anthropology, medicine, education, history, philosophy, psychology, and the visual and performing arts. There is also a steady groundswell of these sub-disciplines of the social sciences and the humanities in conferences, essays, collections of essays and monographs dedicated to auto/biography in Canada and Australia.

The role and function of auto/biographical genres are closely connected to our understanding of the times and places in which we live. Auto/biographies appear in every public sphere and in every kind from the esoteric to the popular. Always, everywhere, one can find the lives of politicians and personalities, stars of sport and popular culture. Works on these celebrities assume a fan club and create a mythic persona who is, after all, one of the people in someone’s culture. Such auto/biography represents and contributes to that culture by virtue of its eclectic nature and its home-grown success.

In its more esoteric or experimental forms, which tend to be self-reflexive, ironic, intertextual, and theoretical, contemporary auto/biography does its cultural work at the relatively local level, often encompassed by small presses or on the internet at a myriad of sites. Whereas public figures rely upon their lives to sell their texts, the artist experiments within a web of dialogue with other artists and for a smaller audience. My web of dialogue is the internet. For the most part I presents myself in a more hesitant, subdued way, on the world wide web, sometimes suspicious of my public role or the risks of being seen as a person engaged in narcissistic self-absorption. At other times on the net, though, I go for broke and tell a great deal as I do on various mental illness sites.

I also have collections of personal essays which explore ways and means of self-representation by bringing together conventions of auto/biography and the essay. The personal essay is a window on an individual's culture and can highlight the interdependence of self and contexts, but a collection of personal essays can also trace changes in those relationships.

Auto/biographical practices offer a productive angle on questions of Baha’i identities, in part because they complicate easy assumptions about identity, community and religion. Auto/biographical practices introduce internal multiplicity into the equation. The personal, family, and community stories quite frequently confirm or resist or, at the very least, critique what counts as the notion of what it means to be a Bahá'í.

Reading Baha’i auto/biography as a shifting configuration of cultural analysis, characterized mainly by relations, for instance, between contexts of production and reception, form and content, but also themes, places, individuals and communities, I can suggest that a groundwork, a framework, has been created. The Bahá’i community has for some time seen the potential--on the one hand to discover new material, modes of analysis and questions for discussion and, on the other hand, to invigorate the whole field of the study of the individual and the community as it presents itself to the wider world. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Sociological Lives: Social Change and the Life Course, Vol.2, editor, Matilda White Riley, Sage Publications, London, 1988.

Ron Price
16 March 1997
(updated: 2/9/’09)
(1700 words)

Re: Bali Vacation Villas give you the value for your money

RonPrice — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 06:14:18 -0000

Sounds delightful...perhaps I will come in my next lifetime assuming, of course, I reincarnate and I have some say in where I can live and luxuriate next time round. Meanwhile: on my old-age pension and with little money in the bank to travel and engage in the life of a tourist, I will have to settle on enjoying the view--from this fine website. Thanking you....from Tasmania....Ron Price, George Town, Australia's oldest town.

Re: Subscribe by email? Yes Please!

RonPrice — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:12:20 -0000

I look forward to see how this new process works in practice.-Ron Price, Tasmania

Re: Time for Ruhi to Show Us the Money: Part I

RonPrice — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:06:06 -0000

Readers who would like to fit these reflections meetings into the context of the new CULTURE OF LEARNING AND GROWTH, can go to Baha’i Library Online and they will then have access to a 64,000 word, 125 page document entitled:THE NEW CULTURE OF LEARNING AND GROWTH: Community and Individual Paradigm Shifts:: A Context and a Personal Text. This article contains my reflections and personal understandings regarding this new culture of learning and growth and the accompanying paradigm shift in the Fourth and Fifth Epochs of the Formative Age: 1986 to 2021 and the Second Epoch(1963-2021) of ‘Abdul-Baha’s Divine Plan.