CREDO AND COMMENT

Erich Fromm is a theorist who brings other theories together. He also emphasizes how your personality is embedded in class, status, education, vocation, your religious and philosophical background and so forth. Since this autobiography and my personality is embedded to a great extent in these factors that Fromm describes, it seems timely to start this first appendix with a note on Fromm. I read Fromm's books off and on for thirty years.

-Ron Price with thanks to Michael Maccoby, "The Two Voices of Erich Fromm: The Prophetic and the Analytic," Society, July/August 1994.

The year I began my pioneering experience, 1962, Erich Fromm, American psychoanalyst and prolific writer in the field of existential psychology, stated his 'credo' in his book Beyond the Chains of Illusions. I have written some of his Credo below since it was consistent with my views back in 1962 and still is. I have commented on some of his Credo expressing views that have remained part of my beliefs during this pioneering venture spanning, as it does now, more than forty years.

"The most important factor for the development of the individual is the structure and the values of the society into which he has been born." Given this fact, my role as a Baha'i has been to spend my life trying to build the kind of society fit for human beings to be born into. For, as Fromm says in his Credo, "society has both a furthering and an inhibiting function. Only in cooperation with others, and in the process of work, does man develop his powers, only in the historical process do humans create themselves. Only when society's aim will have become identical with the aims of humanity will society cease to cripple man and to further evil." In attempting to transform society, Fromm underestimated the need for individuals to adapt to their society. For the Baha'i to be an effective teacher, propagator, of the New Society he has become associated with, he needs to adapt to the larger society in which he has been born and in which he lives his life. The difficulties I had in the first decade of my pioneering experience came, it seems to me in retrospect, from a slow adapting to my society. Later, in the following decades, my effectiveness was due significantly to my more effective adapting to my society.

This adaptive process is slow and arduous work and, for Baha'is, it takes place in the context of action toward goals using a map provided by the Founders of their religion and the legitimate Successors.

"I believe that every man represents humanity. We are different as to intelligence, health and talents. Yet we are all one. We are all saints and sinners, adults and children, and no one is anybody's superior or judge. We have all been awakened with the Buddha, we have all been crucified with Christ, and we have all killed and robbed with Genghis Khan, Stalin, and Hitler. Man's task in life is precisely the paradoxical one of realizing his individuality and at the same time transcending it and arriving at the experience of universality. Only the fully developed individual self can drop the ego." Perhaps this is one way of defining the nature of 'Abdu'l-Baha and the reason for his effectiveness and efficiency. -Ron Price, Pioneeering Over Four Epochs, 9 October 2002.

There is much truth here, Erich.

I must thank you for your wonderful

and illuminating books, enriching

my life as they have, approximating

the jewelled wisdom of this lucid Faith

that I set out with in '62 when I moved

to Dundas and began to pray in those

back streets on cold Canadian afternoons,

read from His sweet-scented streams

and taste of the fruits of His tree

in those years when my father's white hair

blew in the wind for the last time,

my mother was driven to the end of her tether

and that charisma became institutionalized

at the apex of this wondrous Order.

Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusions, Simon and Schuster, NY, 1962, pp.174-182.

Ron Price

9 October 2002

SORTING OUT

"With my first marriage," wrote Bertrand Russell in his autobiography, "I entered upon a period of great happiness and fruitful work. Having no emotional troubles, all my energies went in intellectual directions."¹ Marriage also brought, for Russell, a contentment and a taking pleasure in what he calls his "flippant cleverness." "With each of my marriages, first in 1967 and then in 1975," I could write in trying to summarize some equivalent experience, "I entered upon periods of demanding employment and demanding personal relationships in new towns and new organi-zations." The period of happiness and fruitful work in my life that was the equival- ent of Russell's had to wait until the time I took early retirement at the age of 55 in 1999. -Ron Price with thanks to Bertrand Russell, Autobiography: 1872-1914, George Allen and Unwin 1967, p.126.

It was all so fresh back then,

shiny, new, gold and brown,

sweet loveliness, as much as

any man could ask for.

The road became long and tortuous,

yielded such a mixed delight.

And now I want to ease myself

into life's river and watch it flow

to the sea: protect my sensitivities

with well-developed masks¹

for the inevitable social dramas

where the secret places of my mind

so rarely ever find a public ear.

I have created, here, a self-portrait

for anyone to read revealing

as it does what I have done

with this poetic idiom

to express and defend myself

and deal with my ever-active,

intensely conscious guilt,

especially in the dark night

when I try to sort out

the mysterious trials

of an inscrutable Deity

and what feels like

an immense weight

from the centre of my heart

to the several lobes of my brain.

^{1 This poem draws heavily on 'the introduction' to Selected Letters of Robert Frost, editor, Lawrance Thompson, Jonathan Cape, London, 1965.}