This essay is part of the “Prophet of Shiraz” series, in honor of the Bicentenary of the Bab. Previous essays in this series can be found on the main page under “The Prophet of Shiraz”. 

In the Bab’s and later Baha’u’llah’s writings, we find a new lens in which we can come to understand God and appreciate spiritual reality. We have already discussed how the Bab and Baha’u’llah taught that the actual reality of God,  the Essence, is unknowable to human beings because of the profound differences that exist between us and God.

A crude but helpful analogy for this relationship is to imagine that you are a video game character living in a video game.  What could you know of the creator of the video game?  In a direct sense, nothing.  You are living in a reality, in a world, that is completely dependent on the video game creator but your entire universe is the other objects in the game itself, a world made up of pixels and images.  You simply don’t have the capacity to connect with anything outside of the game.  In the same way, the Bab tells us that our understanding of God is limited to how God expresses His Will within the world that we live in, as we cannot escape the limitations of our own reality to appreciate the Essence of God. That “Will” or “Primal Will” in the terminology of the Bab, is how we experience God and is therefore God to us.

“And within the inmost reality of all things there hath been, and will forever continue to be, a sign from God through which the unity of the Lord is celebrated. This sign, however, is a reflection of His Will present within it, through which nothing is seen but God.”

Though we overwhelmingly think of the world in terms of its material aspects, a fundamental idea in the teachings of the Bab and Baha’u’llah is that everything in creation, including us, is really a spiritual reality in its essence.  That spiritual reality is a reflection of the Divine Will that exists within it.  Materiality is just an aspect of that spirituality, it’s outer expression.

People tend to talk about God in three different ways. For some people, their experience of God and spirituality is from looking within themselves- finding the “light” within and following it. For others, they see God in a world around us, in nature or other people. Most people also see God reflected in one of the founders of the great religions of humanity, who in some way claimed to represent God to us.

The Bab, and later Baha’u’llah, tells us that each of these three senses in which people experience God is true. The supreme and ultimate goal of life is to increasingly recognize the aspect of Divinity that is expressed in these three ways of knowing God. But it isn’t the actual God that we come to know, but how God is revealed to us through all creation, including our own selves.

That first way of experiencing God, and the one available to everyone that has ever lived, is to see the evidences of God within oneself. This aspect of our experience is independent of time and place, because every human throughout history has carried it within them at all times.

“Behold with the eye of thy heart. Verily thy truth, the truth of thy being, is the divinity of thy Lord revealed unto thee and through thee. Thou art He Himself, and He is thou thyself, except that indeed thou art that thou art, and He is that He is.”

Our inner path to experience the divinity of our own selves is the journey each of us is on.  The Bab taught that everything and everyone has two aspects- their “divinity”, also sometimes called their “higher nature”, which reflects the perfection within them, and their outer aspect or “lower nature”.   Our divinity is the expression of the Will of God within us and is the most full and complete experience of God we can ever have, as we experience it personally and directly. It is also the aspect that connects us spiritually with all creation, because all things and all people, despite the outer aspects, are ultimately expressions of the Divine Will, which is their true inner reality:

Every created entity in itself reflects the Greater World…Verily God hath fashioned all things in the form of His Divine Unity in such wise that when a servant is purified from all protestation and doubt and instead reflects the splendors of the divine revelation unto him and through him, in utmost equity, he will be naught but the Divine Self, that ‘verily there is none other God but Him, the Beloved, the Compassionate’.”

In this sense in which we experience God, all the terms of religion, such as “paradise”, “hell”, or any other state, are wrapped up within ourselves. 

“For verily, before God and before those who behold paradise in this earthly life, every moment is the very Day of Resurrection. Shouldst thou purify thy vision and cleanse thy sight, though would assuredly witness that the “Balance” hath been appointed within thine own soul, paradise hath been brought nigh unto thee on thy right hand, hell hath been made to blaze on thy left…Wert thou so desire in thy heart the performance of a good deed, God would assuredly reward thee within thy soul….”

Indeed, it is this inner journey that is the essence and purpose of all religion, in which we find the fullest revelation of God within our own selves.

“True worship is realized for those who worship God through Him and submerge themselves in the Sea of Absolute Unity. For in that Sea, the worshipper and the words or worship are annihilated, and thus there remains not for the worshipper but the very revelation of God and the pure countenance of the Beloved…”

This idea of God somehow existing within us is of course not a new idea and is found in many ancient philosophies and religions.  It is a strong part of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and was expressed in Islam through the “mystics” of Sufism.  What is new in the Bab’s revelation, and will be amplified and further clarified by Baha’u’llah, is that it is not the actual God that we are experiencing when we look inward, but the revelation of divinity  that exists within our own selves.  That divinity is itself an expression of the Will of God in all creation, and therefore, by connecting with our own divinity, we are connecting with the underlying reality of all life. But the Essence of God remains separate in an unknowable sphere beyond any form of human experience to touch.

The difference may seem to be a technical one, and on an experiential level it may be, but it solves a major theological challenge to seeing the great religions of humanity as a coherent whole. It unites two separate but inter-related strands of religious perspective- one that sees God as separate from creation and lording over all things, like a parent towering over her children- and the other that sees God as our close companion with whom we can have a mystical relationship, as a “lover” and a ‘beloved”.   As we will see, the Bab will weave these two strands together with the concept of divine revelation itself, to build a powerful and beautiful tapestry- one that will then explode into reality through the Revelation of Baha’u’llah.