Noah Goodbaum (The Mighty Rhino)

It was first discovered that I had bipolar disorder when I was having delusions. I had delusions that there was a God and that He would counsel believers of every stripe as well as irreligious folk, to take counsel in, to read, and to consider sacred and authoritative the scriptures of all religions. We were supposed to be reading the Tripiṭaka [discourses of the Buddha], we were supposed to be reading the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, the Qur’an, the Torah, the Talmud, etc. I had always wondered about that because I didn’t at the time consider it to have been a vision from God; it sounded too much like what I wanted. It sounded too much like something that I would like to have been true. And so I sort of assumed it couldn’t be. But here was Bahá’u’lláh [founder of the Bahá’í faith], proclaiming that essentially it was. And that Sam Cooke’s change, John Lennon’s change was at hand. That, you know, it was possible to reconcile the children of men and build heaven on Earth, and being the universalist who believes forthrightly and devoutly in, you know, in the sacredness of human beings. And the capacity of every human being on the level of the soul to develop wonderful qualities and to be wonderful, to become wonderful, this sort of appealed to me. Because, as Bahá’u’lláh says, ‘look, it’s possible,’ and, ‘we can win this.’ This benighted dunya, this fallen world, is not necessarily the world which will always be. We can build a society which universalizes an understanding of the Golden Rule and of universal brotherhood, love, compassion….