Bloodpact Blogging and the Consultative Paradigm
Thursday, November 12th, 2009So I’ve made a commitment with some of my closest friends to blog once every couple of days for the next month in our ongoing crusade of sorts to consistently blog. It started with once a day for a week, then turned into this with a biweekly check-in. Though I have a nutty month coming up I think the purpose is that its not that hard to write a couple of paragraphs at night and share what you’re thinking, what you’ve learning, what you’re musing on. So here it is to bloodpact blogging!
One of the themes that’s come up frequently recently is the practice that Baha’is refer to as consultation. Its the community’s mechanism of collectively seeking truth and finding consensus. In consultation you don’t own your contributions per se, but rather once you share your perspective on the matter of hand that perspective belongs to the consulting group. We try to maintain both a frank as well as a loving atmosphere and the goal is at all times to put truth before our current thinking. As such it is my understanding that you act upon the consultation just as much as the consultation acts upon you. You might be informed as deeply by the consultation as you are informing it, and often may find yourself in the position of changing your opinion on a matter a number of times during the course of the consultation.