Just popping in 
Joined: 2004/8/23 5:13
From George Town Tasmania Australia
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It seems to me that God has caused me to inhale the sweet scent of holiness in the highest Paradise and to be refreshed with a crystalline wine cup, tempered at the camphor fountain. This is the way 'Abdu'l-Baha describes a human experience of God in His book Memorials of the Faithful(Wilmette, 1971, p.97). It is very difficult to put this experience of God into words but I try in this prose-poem.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Four Epochs, Decmeber 26th 2005.
He says the just shall quaff of this cup* and at the age of 61 I have done some drinking, a taste, a drop, a fountain.
In India the camphor flame symbolizes an entire ritual, a culmination of worship; with its strong light and fragrance, it is waved to close, to climax, the ritual, to close life itself; it is the last waving.
Look within thee and thou wilt find Me standing within thee: mighty, powerful and self-subsistent.
The camphor flame symbolizes this oneness: the indwelling-God, closeness, closer than life's vein, a mystic unity in that abode in the Centre of Realities where I take leave of self, enter the ocean of union, drink the peerless wine, tempered in that camphor flame: bright and pure, a delicate draught, oh so sweet, beside the Crimson Pillar in the snowwhite path, the gate that opens on the placeless.
God's power is in that flame, symbolically, it is said, the light of that flame is a potent condensed symbol of all that stands for light, for Baha. Tempered, the wine is made to the right strength: not too heavy, not too light, just right, balanced with light, as I have tried to balance this life, taking leave of this dark and narrow world and joining light to light in this my new heavenly homeland that no man has seen, this gathering-place of splendors and its rain of blessings and its tempering camphors: both here and in that Undiscovered Country.
Ron Price 22 September 1995 (revised 26/12/05) * Quran 76:9
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