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181
Regarding the statement in "The Hidden Words",
that man must renounce his own self, the meaning is that
he must renounce his inordinate desires, his selfish purposes
and the promptings of his human self, and seek out the holy
breathings of the spirit, and follow the yearnings of his
higher self, and immerse himself in the sea of sacrifice, with
his heart fixed upon the beauty of the All-Glorious.
As for the reference in "The Hidden Words" regarding the
Covenant entered into on Mount Párán, this signifieth that
in the sight of God the past, the present and the future are
all one and the same--whereas, relative to man, the past is
gone and forgotten, the present is fleeting, and the future is
within the realm of hope. And it is a basic principle of the
Law of God that in every Prophetic Mission, He entereth
into a Covenant with all believers--a Covenant that
endureth until the end of that Mission, until the promised
day when the Personage stipulated at the outset of the
Mission is made manifest. Consider Moses, He Who conversed
with God. Verily, upon Mount Sinai, Moses entered
into a Covenant regarding the Messiah, with all those souls
who would live in the day of the Messiah. And those souls,
although they appeared many centuries after Moses, were
nevertheless--so far as the Covenant, which is outside time,
was concerned--present there with Moses. The Jews,
however, were heedless of this and remembered it not, and
thus they suffered a great and clear loss.
As to the reference in the Arabic "Hidden Words" that the
human being must become detached from self, here too the
meaning is that he should not seek out anything whatever
for his own self in this swiftly-passing life, but that he
should cut the self away, that is, he should yield up the self
and all its concerns on the field of martyrdom, at the time
of the coming of the Lord.
Selections from the Writings of `Abdu'l-Bahá
page 207
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