"...the teachings of Baha'u'llah and Abdu'l-Baha do not present a definite and detailed educational system, but simply offer certain basic principles and set forth a number of teaching ideals that should guide future Baha'i educationalists in their efforts to formulate an adequate teaching curriculum which would be in full harmony with the spirit of the Baha'i Teachings, and would thus meet the requirements and needs of the modern age."

Welcome to Baha'i Education

We are collectively involved in the boldest educational initiative ever attempted in human history. We call it the Baha'i Faith. Education is the beginning, soul and end of all things successfully Baha'i. Education is clearly the central theme of the Baha'i world-view. From the grand redemptive scheme of God down to the practice of organizing society - everything, Baha'u'llah explains, is about education. Every atom in the universe, every drop of the martyr's blood, every act of service and every prayer has no purpose but our training and education.

From the perspective of the Baha'i teachings, so many religious ideas such as salvation, immortality, sight, hearing, life, heaven, paradise, and even that most-abused word "faith" -- have no other meaning than understanding and insight. Indeed, it is Truth that makes us free.

If you consider the Baha'i Faith to be a religion - in the traditional sense of the word - you are in fact missing its beauty, its gift. Indeed, the Baha'i Faith is not a religion but rather a program of education given to us by the latest Universal Educator, Baha'u'llah. That Educator, like all the great Luminaries who have come before, carried forward a mission of divine education on behalf of that ancient compassionate Father whose overwhelming love is the very substance of our universe.

Bahai-education.org:

4/29/05 - Ocean update? Rumor has it that a new Ridvan message and a new book from the House of Justice have found their way into Ocean. Update your library and see for yourself...

Finally!! Ocean v. 218 is released -- fixing the "division by zero" error under XP!

I'm sorry it took so long to fix that issue. I just was not able to re-create the problem myself. It turns out that the problem only manifested on XP machines faster than 3 Ghz. Most of the Ocean work was done on my 1 Ghz Dell laptop. Well, now I have a new desktop computer and the problem was located and resolved!

You can quickly download the English library version of Ocean. Or visit the Ocean Download Page for a CD image or multilingual versions. If you need a ZIP program, you can get a free one "JustZIPit" from http://free-backup.info.

NEW!! Portuguese Library added for Ocean v. 215!!

35 books in Portuguese are now available in a Portuguese library. Just update Ocean to 215 and then look for "Portuguese" under the "Language|Available Languages" menu. I'll have a CD out as soon as possible for those with poor internet connections or firewalls.

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Océano -- A bilingual Spanish/English Ocean CD image is now available for download!

How would you like to be able to switch back and forth from Spanish to English in Ocean? How would you like to send a Spanish/English version of Ocean on CD as a gift to a Spanish-speaking friend? Now you can do this easily -- the Spanish/English CD can be found on the Ocean Download page

Ocean is a free educational-software research tool providing access to a library of the world's religious literature. (About the Ocean Project)

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The Baha'i World Centre has just released an amazing new translation of one of Bahá'u'lláh's most important books: "Gems of Divine Mysteries".

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The publication of Gems of Divine Mysteries is one of the projects undertaken in fulfilment of the Five Year Plan goal, announced in April 2001, of “enriching the translations into English from the Holy Texts”. The volume will further deepen the Western reader’s appreciation of a period infused with potentiality and described by Shoghi Effendi as “the vernal years of Bahá’u’lláh’s ministry”, and assist the students of His Revelation in gaining a more profound insight into its gradual unfoldment.  ”

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Ever try to tell the story of Bahá'u'lláh in only 900 words? Impossible? Well, given the opportunity to produce an article for one of the world's most widely read newspapers, I couldn't very well say no. This article was published in "Dainik Bhaskar", India's most widely read newspaper -- reaching a whopping 13.1 millions readers:

Bahá'u'lláh - The Reluctant Prophet

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Have you seen this yet? The USBNC site now has a web devoted to Baha'i Education. Very well done! www.education.usbnc.org

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Among the new features in Ocean are:

• Multiple Language Support: one-click access to libraries in English, Dutch, German, French and Russian. Moreover, Ocean itself switches languages to match the current Language- library.
• Incremental Book Updates: when changes are made to a book, Ocean fetches only the changes -- rather than re-downloading the entire book.
• Formatted Text: text is now displayed as HTML with all the formatting power such as bold, italic, blockquotes and even inline images!
• Floating Paragraph Numbers:
paragraph numbers float to the left of a paragraph. Subtle but useful
• Smart Quotes & Common-Word Cleanup: Ocean now accents common Baha'i words and fixes single and double quotes (replaces '' and "" with ‘’ and “”). Therefore, documents with text like "Baha'u'llah, Abdu'l-Baha" are automatically displayed as “Bahá’u’lláh, ‘Abdu’l-Bahá” -- which is much more aesthetically pleasing.
• Integrated Typo Reporting: Now, when you find a typo, just highlight it and press CTRL-T. The typo will be reported to the online Librarian for correction. (If you are offline when you do this the typo will be saved and submitted next time you go online.)
• Grouped Hit List: hits are now grouped by author which makes it much easier to deal with a very large list of hits.
• Multiple-bookshelf Searching: no longer must you switch between 'bookshelves' in order to search. Now, just select bookshelves by clicking a check box next to each that you want to search -- more powerful and simpler.

If you do not yet have Ocean, you can download version 215 from the main Ocean webpage: http://Bahai-education.org/ocean/. A CD image is also available to make sharing Ocean with friends and family easier.

Of course many books will need to be manually reformatted to take advantage of Ocean's new capabilities. Because of Ocean's unusual ability to snip a small portion or 'view' of a document from anywhere in the middle, documents formatted for Ocean must follow some additional rules (Ocean cannot use many ordinary HTML files for this reason). To discuss this and XML/XSL conversion issues, I will soon be starting a text-management newsgroup within a week or so. I've also developed a small viewer application which shows what a document will look like in Ocean (including auto-insertion of floating paragraph numbers). This application will be available in a week or so after I have a chance to put it thorough some rigorous work formatting texts.

To get an idea of what documents look like in Ocean, check out the following Ocean-generated HTML documents:

• Century of Light
• Message to the World's Religious Leaders

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I've added a new collection of resources -- Mona and Jimmy Seow's excellent nine-part covenant deepening materials designed for either self-study or workshop-style study of the covenant. See Covenant Workshop Materials

Mr. Seow's materials are especially timely for me as a few of us have been having lots of fun in Delhi with development of a weekend intensive study course on the covenant for the Delhi youth. If you're interested, here is the report we sent to the LSA of Delhi in two parts: 1) Report to LSA and 2) General Assessment and Analysis.

"Some of the younger believers, from letters and reports received here, seem to lack a firm grounding on such matters as the Will and Testament and the deeper spiritual teachings of the Faith. Whenever the grasp of these fundamentals is weak, the friends are almost sure to pay undue attention to secondary procedures, to quibble over details, to lose themselves in personalities, and to founder in a sea of unnecessary inharmony. This has nothing to do with their devotion, their loyalty, their zeal, their eagerness to serve. It is merely a question of not having received, perhaps through lack of sufficient teachers to carry on the all-important work of deepening the friends in their own faith, a strong enough education in the Covenant before the duties and responsibilities of the Administrative Order were thrust upon them."

(On behalf of Shoghi Effendi, 26 June 1956 to the National Spiritual Assembly of Canada)

I hope you find the tools, resources and ideas presented on this web page helpful and empowering in your efforts to make life itself a positive learning experience.

"He that riseth to serve My Cause should manifest My wisdom, and bend every effort to banish ignorance from the earth."

Tablets of Bahá'u'lláh, p. 138