My book Paradise of Presence is a new challenge to Western readers. It is out now, available globally as an e-book and paperback. The UBL (universal book link) is https://books2read.com/Paradise-of-Presence. This takes you to a page that shows all the outlets where the book can be purchased. For Amazon, it shows only the US store; however, the book is available from all Amazon stores.
After completing the publishing process, I had a minor mental collapse. I became brain dead. I no longer had to juggle in my mind a host of issues and tiny details. Apart from a week off visiting my daughter in May, I pretty much worked non-stop all year in order to get to the finish line. I thought the editing process would never end. Even while Steve was laying up the book in Vellum, I was still making substantial changes to a few paragraphs. Vellum shows the text of the book as it would appear on a Kindle. Reading it on this new platform showed me that some paragraphs were still wordy and that I needed to streamline them more. It’s so easy to get caught up in the detail and lose sight of the narrative you are presenting for the reader. Deciding what is a key factor to include and what is just noise can’t be assessed until the text is nearing its final stage.
Put in a nutshell, the book is about who Baha’u’llah is and why a person benefits from making him central to their lives. I also explain how a person goes about doing that – by reading his writings – and what a magical experience it is to know him intimately. Looked at in this way, the book is self-biographical. Over the past year, I have developed a new appreciation of Baha’u’llah’s exhortation to devote oneself to his cause. In particular, as I worked through the long nights and short days, I explored the relationship between work and worship, and Baha’u’llah’s principle that work is worship if done as a service.
I learned that goals can be achieved against overwhelming odds through sheer determination, patience and single-mindedness. Abdu’l-Baha describes love as the light that shines in darkness.* This image kept me going. I knew that I had written a book that people would struggle to fit with their worldview, and that would likely trigger them psychologically and spiritually. Because, in order to write the book, I had to state rather baldly challenging things that Baha’u’llah said, such as his claim to be the return of all the prophets and the consumation of their religions. Equally difficult to process is his claim that he brought paradise with him, and that people could enter his paradise if they wanted to, simply by absorbing his writings with an unbiased mind. Therefore, I felt like I was up against it in writing the book. I felt like I was writing into an abyss, where I would have to lay the groundwork for people so that they could consider Baha’u’llah’s ideas without thinking they were entering the mind of a crazy person.
On top of that, another challenge was that I was presenting a vision of Baha’u’llah’s message that was radically different from the one that the Baha’i community promotes. The community sees its administration as being central to Baha’u’llah’s faith, whereas I think that Baha’u’llah is central. The administration has only the role of managing community affairs in the physical world. Consequently, I had to create a narrative that presented a new and engaging story about the faith, which didn’t draw on the community’s standard narrative and jargon. Also I didn’t expect support from the Baha’i community, even though I was ostensibly doing something the community would be pleased about. It is rare – and confusing for some – that a community exile would remain a believer and retain a personal commitment to their sacred duty to spread Baha’u’llah’s teachings worldwide.
The personal development guru Jim Rohn teaches that success (in whatever form) comes not with good fortune or luck but with defined goals and daily discipline. The one who achieves their dreams is the one who takes the small steps required each day to achieve them. Gradually, over the past year, those daily steps morphed into my daily devotional practice, so that my work and worship combined to become the force behind my endeavor. Even though the people around me thought I was wasting my time, I saw the effort as the light that would shine in the darkness of the world that didn’t believe me. The book now carries the promise of that light to others.
*See Ali Youssefi’s beautiful video “Love is the Light” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCommqds0u8