Some Thoughts on Invention:

Context and Vision for the Glass Book

© Dana Paxson 2014

In a conversation several decades ago, I was talking with a respected Bahá’í about innovation, inventions, and ideas. From the conversation an insight emerged: rather than being some kind of property to which we can claim the rights of ownership, ideas are gifts to us from the greater world. That insight has since formed the basis for much of my treatment of the ideas that come to me, allowing me to try to give them form, dynamics, and utility in service to our rich, spiritualizing human existence.

Ideas do not arrive in isolation. They often derive in whole or in part from the ideas than have preceded them into our world. The flow of gifts knows no ownership or property; it lavishes itself on us, the divine rain of quickening energy for human advancement; we work side by side, sharing, transforming each other’s visions into actualities of our own. In the past 180 years and more, this divine rain has swelled into a deluge, a flood, a tsunami that has torn away at the very foundations of the long-dominant systems of ownership, property, and wealth that have ruled the ways we treated ideas.

Bringing ideas into life as inventions in a world immersed in a crumbling and antiquated order of things is a challenge. To gain visibility and value for one’s ideas, the inventor must find ways to prevent others from stealing them and imposing their own legal barriers against the use of the ideas. Such thefts have long been routine – considered by many “business as usual” – and often the thieves are no less than the large corporate or governmental entities that seek to suppress the emergence of the new ideas. But ideas breed. My own path has demonstrated this truth.

We balance on the cusp of transition. Our way forward takes us away from a place where legal battles entangle innovation and invention in toils of claims and counterclaims, paralyzing human advancement. It takes us onward to places where such efforts as “open-source” development acknowledge the flow and breeding of ideas into material realities, where the principle of property is replaced by the principle of common advancement. In this changing context, patents become not weapons or fortifications against others, but seedbeds to serve others.

With all this firmly in mind, it must be observed that the Glass Book invention is not by itself an entity to be treated apart from others of similar kind. It is an essay in the craft of preservation and presentation of priceless knowledge. There are many such inventions, each of which advances the art in its own way, and there will be many more. This, for me, is a key aspect of the dynamic stream of human transformation, and I share what I do in attempting to participate, shoulder to shoulder, with all the others who labor in this astonishing process.

I see the Glass Book as a halting step on a branching path that will lead to much-greater advances. Its initial implementations will be mere weak images of what it may become; the first versions will not last long enough, remain durable and inviolable as they should, and present their content in ways most fitting, but they will serve to energize further innovations that will in the end accomplish all these things and more. Others are already doing work that will serve, augment, and surpass this effort and lead to very great things; I embrace it all.

I give thanks for the promptings that generated the idea of the Glass Book for me. Two passages from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, the Manifestation of God in our time, sowed the seeds, both referring to one image that captured my imagination. First, from Bahá’u’lláh’s Hidden Words:

“O YE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD! Know, verily, that an unforeseen calamity followeth you, and grievous retribution awaiteth you. Think not that which ye have committed hath been effaced in My sight. By My beauty! All your doings hath My pen graven with open characters upon tablets of chrysolite.”

And second, from Bahá’u’lláh’s Tablet of Wisdom:

“… I will also mention for thee the invocation voiced by Bálinus who was familiar with the theories put forward by the Father of Philosophy regarding the mysteries of creation as given in his chrysolite tablets, that everyone may be fully assured of the things We have elucidated for thee in this manifest Tablet, which, if pressed with the hand of fairness and knowledge, will yield the spirit of life for the quickening of all created things.”

I am struck by the phrase “tablets of chrysolite”. As is often the case with the Bahá’í Writings, one must take care to avoid generating restrictions of meaning and understanding before grasping the metaphorical possibilities to one’s best ability. I prefer to steer clear of the chemical and physical specifics of chrysolite, because as they are known today they constitute potential obstacles to greater understanding. The same is true in a lesser degree for the ascriptions given chrysolite in other contexts. So when I felt the power of the words, I took only the attributes of transparency and permanence onward. Hence the Glass Book invention. Even this is a limitation, a restriction, reflecting simply my own human inadequacies.

I’ll close this essay with my own admittedly-narrow view of what the Glass Book might in the long term become. My underlying belief is that everything I’ve conceived, everything we all conceive in this current time falls utterly short of describing anything that is to come over such long time scales. But the luster of this amazing age we live in is enough to make me offer this:

Fifty thousand years have passed since the Revelation of Bahá’u’lláh dawned into the human world, transforming everything known to our species and everything else as well. A few researchers enter a chamber adjoining the great Mashriqu’l-Adhkár of the Antarctic, situated at Earth’s South Pole. They speak in quiet tones in a language that seems drawn from all the ancient languages of humankind, with a music and prosody and cadence all its own, rich in meanings and undercurrents.

One of the researchers gestures toward a transparent wall. It comes alight, its energies furnished from the Sun. The original text of the Tablet of Carmel of Bahá’u’lláh appears, filling much of the wall in the characters as revealed. Another gesture, and a section of one passage is amplified; a third, and annotations emerge beneath it. Finally, a signal begins a chant of the passage in the original language, filling the chamber with the sweet sounds reflecting the original utterance of the Manifestation of God fifty millennia before.

Another one of those present waits for the chant to end, and raises a hand. Now several separate panes of text emerge surrounding the original, each in a different language and script, illuminated and annotated. Those present begin a consultation in murmured tones. Finally from all of them a soft sigh of contentment is audible. One raises two hands, and the transparent wall fades to its former clarity.

This visualization prompted the initial development of a sketch for a novel of the future. Inventions happen.

Thank you for reading all of this essay. I hope it is of some use.