A. “Now I would like to say what I feel about what you asked me regarding the question of mass conversion and consolidation : the value of stopping teaching to consolidate, or to go on with the teaching work. I do not see any reason why I should not say to the Baha’is — because we are, after all, all one, whether we are National Spiritual Assembly members, or Local Assembly members, or nothing official, we are all Baha’is together and it is our joint religion, we all love it — therefore, why shouldn’t I say to you what I said to your National Assembly ? I said I would not be a bit surprised if the National spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of India did not feel sometimes as if it had got hold of a crocodile by the tail, a big one, and did not quite know what to do with it. Now, this mass conversion or mass teaching that you have — and I don’t like personally any of these terms, I like the term of ‘entering the cause in troops’ which is a term of the Master and is a wonderful, wonderful term — but this entering the Cause of Baha’u’llah in troops, which is now taking place in India, of course poses tremendous problems — any one can understand that. You have people coming in by the thousands who are not in a position, at the present time, with a few exceptions, to do anything directly for the Faith. You see what I mean: they do not support the Fund yet, because they either haven’t learnt to or they haven’t got enough money to give any thing. They don’t go out and circulate because they are villagers, they are living, in their own small communities. It is all very new to them. They want to hear more and understand more and learn more and that means somebody has to go and teach them and they have yet not reached a point where they are beginning to give back great returns to your community. Many of the people in this room, I suppose, are businessmen with experience, merchants perhaps, or some kind of businessmen or may be students of Economics. Now you all know that when you invest something, I am not talking about something that is already a going concern, but when you want to develop something that is entirely new, like a gold mine, a diamond mine or an oil well, the capital expenditure is tremendous. You have to put in a great deal of capital before you get any dividends back before you get any return on your investment, because you have to set up machinery, you have to send out people to exploit the situation, you have to get the thing out of the ground, you have to refine it and then you start to market it, then you get very heavy returns on your investment.
‘The speed with which the Cause is spreading here shows that the capacity of the villagers in India is your oil field. The people that are exploiting it at the present time, let us say, are the Indian Baha’is. All this honour goes to you. In time the immense riches from this spiritual investment will flow back into your community.
“The destiny of the human race is to accept Baha’u’llah, we know that as Baha’is. Now, it has to start sometime and it is a little late in starting, because this Cause is over 120 years old and we are only beginning to get the entrance of people by troops into the Faith. We must not say that this is too soon, we must say this is too late. We are in a hurry. We have lost a hundred years of the Baha’i cycle. We want it to go faster every day, no matter what kind of problems arise from its going faster. Everything in the world goes by its own time. This evidently is the time for a spiritual harvest in India. No one of you, no one in Haifa, no one on this planet can tell you how long this time is going to last. You see what I mean? It may last long enough for India’s 450 million Indians to become Baha’is, it may stop tomorrow like that. (Ruhiyyih Khanum snapped her fingers). You don’t know. You don’t know whether we are going to find that the political development of India goes forward so fast that the people in villages become politically minded and instead of being interested in the Teachings of Baha’u’llah, which we know are the Solution to the world’s problems, they are going to be interested in whatever the local politician says who comes and sits under a tree and talks to them. For one reason or another you have no way of knowing whether it is going on for one year, ten years, a hundred years or a thousand years. All you now know here in India is that you have this extraordinary opportunity. You and Africa are leading the whole world, so far, in this field of teaching, but you don’t know how long the opportunity will last. I only know one case in the whole Baha’i teachings where it says, you must not teach, and that is when it is forbidden by the Government, because we must be loyal to our Government; but if you can show me one single place in the Teachings where there is any other excuse for not teaching, I would like to know what it is. And Baha'u'llah certainly does not say anywhere that you must stop teaching in order to consolidate. You must do the two together. You cannot say that ‘the crocodile is getting too big and I am not going to do anything more about it.’ I think there is a story —I don’t remember from which country it comes — that the dragon swallowed the world. Perhaps it is a nice dragon that you have by the tail that will go on getting bigger and bigger and bigger and swallow the world with the teachings of Baha’u’llah. How do you know? You don’t have to be afraid of it. All you have to do is to hang on to its tail. Let it pull you ahead, and have confidence in Baha’u’llah. If anything goes wrong with this system, then you say to Baha’u’llah: “Look, You are the One who said to teach, all I did was to obey You.”
(Amatul-Baha Visits India, by Violette Nakhjavani, Baha’i Publishing Trust - India)
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