|
..In order to recognize the truth, one must first make a personal effort and hold a certain attitude towards life. Whoever encounters the light of truth with a prejudiced mind set on the religious traditions of the past and their conventional interpretation, whoever is guided by his self-made concept of the world, whoever is crammed with ideas of his own which he has come so to cherish that he is unwilling to correct them, for him truth will remain hidden behind the veil of his "idle fancies and vain imaginations". Only he who seeks the truth will find it. And a true seeker is only he who purifies "his heart... from the obscuring dust of all acquired knowledge": "He must so cleanse his heart that no remnant of either love or hate may linger therein, lest that love blindly incline him to error or that hate repel him away from the truth". This is the purity of heart referred to by Jesus when He said: "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God (Matt 5:8)" and "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice (John 18:37)". Baha'u'llah gives us the assurance that "He hath endowed every soul with the capacity to recognize the signs of God" and that to the sincere seeker who tears away the veils of preconceived ideas, the light of divine truth will appear as manifest as "the sun in its noontide glory".
(22:1)
see
|