Welcome to the THIRD season of Dawn of an Era of Well-Being. This season we are dedicating our focus to the world’s religions, and discovering how religion and spirituality can help bring us together in a more harmonious condition.
Today we will turn our attention to the fascinating and perhaps not very well-understood spiritual faith of the Baha’i with Elena Mustakova.
A relative newcomer to the spiritual traditions, the Baha’i religion was founded in Iraq in the 19th century by Mīrzā Ḥosayn ʿAlī Nūrī—also known as Bahāʾ Allāh, meaning “Glory of God.” The Baha’i belief system posits that Bahāʾ Allāh was an actual manifestation of God. Baha’i tradition is very inclusive of the Abrahamic religions and suggests a continuity amongst all of these faiths, and their key figures: Jesus, Mohammed, Moses, etc. As the encyclopedia Brittanica points out: “Bahāʾīs believe in the oneness of humanity and devote themselves to the abolition of racial, class, and religious prejudices. The great bulk of Bahāʾī teachings is concerned with social ethics. The faith has no priesthood and does not observe ritual forms in its worship.”
Elena Mustakova is a spiritual philosopher, evolutionary thinker, educator, psychologist, and social scientist, and an expert on the systemic links between individual health, culture, moral development, language, and collective social health. Her work is inspired by Bahá’í ontological understanding of reality as a spiritual phenomenon of the evolution of consciousness.
Elena believes individual consciousness has the potential to evolve towards wholeness throughout the lifespan to the extent to which people grasp and take ownership of that process. Collective consciousness has evolved through many stages of broadening allegiances toward more just and comprehensive forms of governance – from clans, all the way to nation states and even geo-political allegiances. Both individual and collective evolution can be quite painful when not understood. Her commitment is to education that helps people grasp the intersection of their individual micro experience and the macro socio-historical transformation under way and develop conscious agency.
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