Answers

De Simple Silence.

Answers
Country	USA
Language	English
Publisher	Zeno Publishing Services

Contents 1 Shariat 2 Faith In Baba's Judgement 3 Mid-Life Crisis ? 4 Reunion With God ? 5 True Knowledge ?

[modifier] Shariat

May 1981

Question : The Hindus, Christians, Parsis, we all perform external ceremonies. Do they have any significance? I personally feel they have no intrinsic value (a question asked of Meher Baba in February, 1929).

Answer [Meher Baba] : All Prophets and Sadgurus made the disciples of their inner circles spiritually perfect, as perfect as they themselves were. They made them realize God and freed them from the ceaseless rounds of births and deaths. To the disciples of their outer circles they showed the paths of Bhakti and Seva (Devotion and Service), and instilled into their minds certain esoteric facts. For the masses of people they left the shariat or the ceremonial side of religion and taught them doctrines which they could understand.

But even the shariat, which the great Masters and Avatars taught ordinary people, is, if properly understood, full of deep significance. The kusti ceremony of the Zorastrians, the tal-bhajan of the Hindus, and the namaz of the Muslims are nothing but beautiful remedies for the removal of sanskaras.

Take the kusti ceremony of the followers of Zoraster. The three knots, that are tied when performing this ceremony, indicate humata, hukhta and huvarshta, or good thoughts, good words and good deeds. The striking off, of the sacred thread, while reciting the kusti prayers has also great significance. From the material standpoint, it means the removal of dust that may be on the thread (outward manifestation) ; from the exoteric religious standpoint, it signifies the act of driving away of bad desires and bad thoughts (mental manifestation), and from the esoteric spiritual standpoint, it signifies the wiping out of sanskaras.

If the kusti ceremony is performed in right earnest and with great sincerity of heart, it certainly wipes out some of one’s sanskaras. But if one performs it a thousand times a day only mechanically, just for show or for the observance of customs, it will be of no avail. One kusti ceremony performed with genuine devotion will do far more good than one thousand kusti ceremonies performed without genuine devotion.

The purpose of the tal-bhajan of the Hindus and of the namaz of the Muslims is no different from that of the kusti ceremony of the Zorastrians. Both are meant to divert the devotees minds from the world to God. But this purpose is served only if prayers are offered with devotion and sincerity. You must certainly pray to God, but do not reduce your prayers to a farce. You may jump, shouting at the top of your voice, ‘Tukaram,’ ‘Tukaram’ for years together, but if that shouting is devoid of genuine devotion, will it do any good to you? It is not the high and wide jumping, high and low singing, and slow and fast ringing of the tal that takes you nearer to God. What is required for your spiritual upliftment is bhakti or devotion, and not the mechanical murmuring or shouting of mantras.

It is no exaggeration to say that most of the followers of every religion pray to God and celebrate ceremonies with a view to do their duty not by God, but by shariat. A Zorastrian, while offering prayers, is oft seen counting the number of the remaining pages of a lengthy yasht (chapter) which he has just begun praying and which he is eager to finish off. Poor fellow! He thinks not of God, but of getting relieved from it as early as he can. Have you not seen Parsi priests inquiring the prices of vegetables and rates of shares in the midst of their prayers? Have you not seen orthodox Parsis gazing at the dainty dishes, while performing the kushti ceremony at the time of meals? Write in your heart that prayers offered and ceremonies celebrated without devotion are neither of earthly nor heavenly use.

Shariat is useful, only if it is observed in the proper spirit, i.e. with great devotion and sincerity.

[modifier] Faith In Baba's Judgement

May 1981

Questions sent in by readers are answered by disciples who have lived with Meher Baba

Question : Both in my personal and professional life, particularly the latter, I procrastinate a great deal. Consequently, my friends, my colleagues, my business associates, don’t trust me. A stage has come in my life when I have no self-respect for myself. Nobody trusts me anymore. Can you help me?

Answer : First a direct question. Do you trust yourself? Are you afraid that when you do the next thing you have to do, you’re going to make a mess of it? Is this why you dread to get on with things and so procrastinate and procrastinate until you judge unconsciously that the true quality of your work will be lost in the emotional smoke of your delays?

If this is true, aren’t you being dishonest with yourself about the very base of your procrastination? And if this is true, isn’t this a ridiculous situation in which you can’t have the faith in yourself that Meher Baba has in you? In fact, Meher Baba’s faith is not faith, it’s knowledge. He knows you, evaluates you and chooses you to know directly of his presence. This does not happen to an individual until he has built up some qualities and capabilities that merit this grace of the Avatar. Therefore there can be no question about your having the capability to do a good job in the work in which the Avatar has chosen to place you for this lifetime.

But your habit of doubting your own capability has now produced this compensating habit of procrastination, and now this must be dealt with as if it were a despot king in its own fortified kingdom. But first, it is necessary to remove the root source of the ill. Otherwise it will be a simple see-saw of long drawn-out effort with now one side seeming to gain, then the other. So first you must ask yourself clearly whether there can be any doubt of the fact that Meher Baba knows you, he has selected you to know him, he knows your qualities and your needs, and he has chosen tasks for you to do in this life-time for which he as ascertained that you have at a minimum, totally adequate tools for the job.

If you cannot answer simply and clearly « yes » to each of these questions to yourself, then your first task must be to dig into the written and oral record Meher Baba has left with us until you can know within yourself that these are the base of what Meher Baba does with us for our life in him.

When you have asked and answered these questions affirmatively, there should be a clear realization that Meher Baba himself puts far greater value on your capabilities than you do. In this case it would be a great lack of faith in Meher Baba for you not to jump into the job at hand to show Meher Baba your faith in his judgement. Remember Meher Baba accepts you into his fold with your warts, moles et al.

Try an experiment in the first task you do. Deliberately invite Meher Baba (please, not in front of a secretary or a fellow-worker — They might not understand your knowledge of Meher Baba’s omnipresence!) to be your partner in the project. Know that he takes this seriously, and get along with the job with Meher Baba at your elbow, (you wouldn’t be holding a copy of Answers if Meher Baba were not behind me, nudging me!).

If the first task you have selected with Meher Baba cannot be done and handed over at the first sitting, set the best time in your judgement for it to be continued. If your habit of procrastination has produced the trick of imagined faulty memory, then tell Meher Baba about this as you put down the work and ask his help in getting on with this next hurdle. Meanwhile, you dream up a little trick of your own such as setting an alarm clock or entering notation on a calendar if you ever look at it, or write a note to yourself on a slip of paper and clip it to something that you know you have to look at. Or even write it down in a pocket Day-Timer, if you promise yourself you will consult it and implement it.

Remember the first one or two with Meher Baba jobs are likely to be total warfare. Your ego will know that it may well be on the block for eventual slaughter and it will resist this frontal attack in every way possible.

We do not suggest you try at one stroke to turn from total procrastination to total diligence. Rather, how about selecting jobs at first in one area of your life, or related to one particular individual? Try to bring those into an ordered schedule at first, and when you have that compartment in good shape, choose another.

Almost inevitably you will find early in the game the necessity of starting to think about priorities. It sometimes happens that procrastination springs from an originally overly-concientious attitude. This does not mean someone who tries diligently to do a good job, but someone who does not have sufficient self-defence to protect himself from all the real as well as imagined responsibilities in his life. In such a state the conscientious individual drains progressively his energy and memory resources. Eventually the resolve to accomplish begins to break down, and finally the chaos which is also labelled as procrastination sets in. This is not the procrastination rooted in self-doubt, but the putting-off resulting from poor self-protection and exhaustion. If you promise to reach a certain place at a given time do so at any cost.

Any individual who is capable and tries moreover to deliver his work as committed, must work out a clear system of priorities and be willing to give voice to it when he accepts a new assignment. For instance, if one agrees to help a friend repair his car, this will probably have to be done on a week-end and weighed against other responsibilities. The dangers are that, for instance, one may offer to do it on a week evening and then never have the time and energy for it. Or that an incorrect weighing of what has to get done on the next several week-ends results in constant postponement.

Too often one is hungry for human warmth and friendship, and wants it right now, hence promises a help or a timing that just can’t be met. This is like borrowing money for a splurge that one can’t repay. But this is rarely the case for job and friendship responsibilities. Almost always the time and energy are available somewhere, but the mental system of priorities and honest judgement of « when » is often lacking.

This is not a difficult subject to tackle. The first priority of course has to go to one’s relationship with Meher Baba. Wherever one senses the hand of Meher Baba in one’s life, this must have top attention.

A special word on Meher Baba’s ‘timing.’ To be on time is not enough. When Meher Baba set 10 :00 a.m. for a meeting, almost always he arrived 15 to 30 minutes early. If you were not already among those waiting for him you were severely upbraided. If you pointed out that he had arrived before the hour he himself had appointed, and that you had infact come at the required time, Meher Baba would let you know that everything for the Avatar must be done not only with meticulous care but completely in advance.

Another special word on the Avatar’s priorities for us, which in some way becomes part of one’s own intimate relation with the Avatar. « How did you sleep? » « Did you sleep long enough? » « Did you have a good breakfast? » « Is your job paying you well enough so that you can eat andclothe yourself decently? »

These were the questions that always greeted you when you came into the Avatar’s presence first thing in the morning. They add up to his insistence that we establish and maintain a decent and healthy baseline of living. Meher Baba never wasted excessive time on these questions. They were asked quickly, clearly and then the subject was changed. But if the answers were not positive and clear, then this became the first priority topic until a remediel course had been set.

Odd that the Avatar should give such attention to seemingly trivial points in the dream of Creation? No, he clearly insisted we care for these bodies properly, and then it was time to get on with his plan for untying our inner knots.

There are a thousand ways to set up an orderly life in which procrastination disappears and one welcomes the next moment of the great adventure of life with the Avatar. The fact that Meher Baba has now dropped the body has nothing to do with this exciting process of discovery. All you need to do is to have a small fraction of the confidence in your self that the Avatar has in you, open your life to a beginning of his direct participation in daily events with you, and on this honest base he will rapidly show you the gradual, natural and totally acceptable way to establish order in your life.

[modifier] Mid-Life Crisis ?

May 1981

Questions sent in by readers are answered by disciples who have lived with Meher Baba

Question : I have been through life without being serious. My school and college days were days of fun, even my marriage was a frivolous arrangement. For the first time a divorce situation and the fear of losing my child (legally), has created fear in me. I have become serious and come to realise what responsibility means. But in the process I have lost my youth, my sense of humour, a smile on my face... I am truly growing old when I am just 40 years old. Could it be some form of mid-life crisis?

Answer : How lucky you are that Meher Baba has allowed you to see and understand this situation in your life before it is too late to retrace your steps and make a tangible change in this lifetime. Now you can look forward to all the rich years of establishing deep values on the bases you will discover only with Meher Baba, of re-establishing the smile on your lips on a foundation that can never be lost, of etching a serenity on to your face which is beyond years and the wrinkles of time.

Sooner or later the Avatar precipitates each person into a rugged phase of taking stock of himself and a vigorous cleaning out of the attic. It often is not a very pretty process. Almost always it is introduced through a shock in a deeply important relationship. Sometimes it is the death of a dear one, or it can be love thrown back in one’s face. Or it may be an unexpected stone wall barring accomplishment of a central ambition in life.

Usually one’s emotional upset is associated with the tragic incident that triggered this very profound internal cleaning up that one becomes obsessed by the incident itself. Occasionally, it crosses one’s mind that in the present situation, time does not seem to be affording its usual healing effect and no wonder. The wound that has been opened up is not just the loss of the dear one or the cherished hope. It is the accumulation of wounds that one has inflicted on one’s own innerself through countless actions superficially and heedlessly judged and executed. Meher Baba has only used the present sharp upset as the key to open the door to an honest evaluation of one’s deepest enduring problems.

For some time the one who must do the house-cleaning on himself continues to blame his misery on the immediate incident. Something remarkably similar to real emotional imbalance can occur during this period, as the emotional pressures set in motion are far greater and more numerous than one has ever dealt with before. The combination of pain, disorientation and the frustration of finding no solutions anywhere can cause the individual to wonder if he will not truly go insane.

This never happens, however, as the source of the malaise is quite different from the emotional blockages and repressions which are so often the cause of medical imbalance. This is the Avatar who has opened our personal Pandora’s box, and he is the psychologist beyond all psychologists. He knows our timing, our needs, our capabilities and the available resources. He knows exactly what we can bear and the extent of it. He does not over-load, although frequently he takes us way beyond anything that we would have dreamt that we could bear. He takes us to our limits, and just before reaching a breaking point pulls us back from the brink.

This is the Avatar’s job and if we can just feel and understand with conviction that he is in the middle of it and helping us in every way to get on with an absolutely vital job, then we will ease greatly our own pain and speed the process immeasurably. Infact, while it may sound a bit crazy, the whole house-cleaning can even become an exhilirating adventure, specially the awareness that we are sharing in the Avatar’s universal work.

A word of warning. Don’t try to patch up and gloss over the situation too rapidly. If the legal problem in relation to your child drags on and you are tempted to move violently to right or left in order to hasten the decision, try to resist hastiness by taking Meher Baba into the centre of the situation. When he is doing a really complete job on one of our inner knots he has a way of streaching out the circumstances until we feel we can no longer endure the indecision. If we toss in the sponge and act hastily just in order to get things off dead centre, he will only have to arrange another similar situation to teach us that we can endure, and to teach us how to turn to him in our deep bewilderment. In the process you will find several crutches lying in the corner. Do not be tempted to use them, for when you enter Meher Baba’s fold, it becomes his job to see you through the trials that impede your spiritual growth. What really matters is your honesty and conviction.

One loses one’s smile, sense of humour and youth when one unwittingly assumes that the entire burden of judgement, decision and action rests on one’s own shoulders. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. To know who Meher Baba is and to begin to understand the Avatar’s role in our lives, we must crack this innate conviction. It is a part of the entire dream we have of duality. In it we are convinced that we are separate. We know that we are essentially alone. It is obvious that no one else really knows what goes on in our heads and hearts. Certainly if anything is going to get done, we in ourselves are responsible and we’re fools if we depend finally on someone else.

You have spent years unwittingly avoiding responsibility. Now you have been shocked into assuming responsibility. These are two poles of the opposites. The reality is that neither is true. The truth is unity, and the truth is the presence of the Avatar in our lives. In our lives we discover his presence, that he knows, that he is living carefully with us, and that the solution of living responsibility is in fact the unified effort of one in the Avatar.

As this knowledge begins to dawn, a sense of humour creeps quietly back into the house. A smile of contentment in the security of the Avatar’s care comes back to one’s lips. At 70 and 80 one feels younger than one did at 40. This crisis is not a crisis, but the opening of a window onto the courtyard of Reality.

[modifier] Reunion With God ?

November 1980

Questions sent in by readers are answered by disciples who have lived with Meher Baba

Question : If mankind believes that man is separated from God (is it a problem?) and the purpose of life is to attain reunion with God, how should one go about? It sounds too philosophical and I wonder if there is a training for this (Please do not suggest Yoga, meditation, est or any other mumbo-jumbo. I have already gone through all these gymnastics).

Answer : The purpose of life is variously described by the great Messengers, and the Avatar himself says at one time that it is this, and at another time that. But apparently all of these are descriptions of different facets of the same reality. To describe an apple as a small rounded object is quite correct. To describe it as a collection of sweet watery cells enveloped by a relatively tough skin is also valid. It can also variously be described as red, or yellow, or green, and slightly slippery, and sweetly scented, and all refer to the same object.

Indeed, the individual human being inevitably rediscovers God as the reality, but at the same instant he also does a seemingly endless number of additional things such as realizing infinite love, infinite knowledge, power and wisdom, the indivisibility of infinitude, and so on and on. All of these can be described as the purpose of life without there being the slightest accuracy of contradiction, as all are inherent in what is realized.

In his God Speaks, Meher Baba gives us an extraordinarily precise, detailed description of God in creation, the essential start of which we tend either to skip over or unconsciously reject. He describes the original state of God as totally unconscious, but innate within God the potentiality for the Whim to know His divinity consciously.

It is difficult for us to conceive all-knowing God as totally unconscious, in fact such a statement seems to describe exactly the reverse of divinity. However, anyone involved in a real learning process knows how often one has to neutralize all of one’s instincts to feel, and be prepared to entertain for just a little while a challengingly different hypothesis.

So let us be prepared to focus sincerely on the possibility that the original (beyond — the beyond) state of God was one of total unconsciousness of His Godhood. Then Meher Baba talks about the stirring of the innate Whim within God to know consciously His own Godhood. Out of the moving of the Whim all of creation emerges, and Baba describes how apparently separated droplets of the reality of God become involved in the experiencing of the creation stirred up by the Whim. However, innumerable times Meher Baba warns us that all this is apparently, and should not be mistaken for in reality.

One further essential key. In this apparent separation, motion interaction, consciousness is developed (not created, but developed, just as a photograph is in a chemical bath, for even consciousness was innately in the infinitude of God but in an undeveloped state), thus bringing into an active state the end purpose of the Whim. However, there is a gap stiIl. Consciousness, as it slowly develops, focusses on the apparent separateness (bodies), motion, interaction and calls all this reality. If there is a tragedy in creation, it is this mistaking by consciousness of the apparent for the real, and faiIing totally to discern Godhead with its capabilities. No doubt the total mechanism of the development and perfecting of consciousness of Godhood is perfection itself, but to a poor human being caught up in trying to unravel the results of this original misidentification of the apparent as the real, the process is indeed tediously trying and can be occasionally downright disastrous.

As human experience spins along and results are remembered and collated by the ego which administers the computer system of the mental body, discrepancies between expectancies and actual results are noted. Eventually the ego is caught in the impasse of recognizing the disastrous results of its vigorous actions. Finally it is driven to entertain the unthinkable hypothesis that reality is not bodies, separateness, motion, interaction. Somewhere it encounters the heresy that, in fact, reality is oneness, spirit, infinite indivisible eternity. Then there can be no turning back for any return can only be to the old values based on separateness which have already been rejected as insufficient.

When the last habit pattern and its compulsions based on the mistaken concept of separate materiality has been finally worn out and discarded, Meher Baba says the drop-soul goes through a mighty leap to realize itself as god, which it always was. The reunion is no more than a change of the focus of consciousness. In fact there never was any separation, no voyage, nothing to be reunited. The whole dream adventure of creation was no more than the development of the potential for consciousness so that God should know consciously His own divinity.

Not so fast, though. Granting all this may be so, the part of the question on how to help the process along still stands. What can I do, once I have seriously entertained the possibility of some kind of return to God? Meher Baba gives a simple answer : love. This he terms the highroad of all roads to the inner goal. Further, he says that during and for some while after the lifetime of the Avatar, the highroad of love is pre-eminently available to the aspirant. Later, as the force of the manifestation of the Avatar begins to wane, so does ready access to this highroad, and the aspirant must increasingly utilize secondary roads such as meditation, chants, prayers and so on. As for development of occult powers, he warns that occult experience is not spiritual development and can be a powerfully subtle side-track from the true path.

Love! But what about it? Millions of people search every day for it and few find it. Then how can one utilize it as the highroad to truth? Meher Baba clarifies that true love (and one must assume that this is the only love that can have spiritual significance) is a gift of grace from the Master, and to receive it the aspirant must merit and win it. How this is done is an exciting story in itself which can be mined out in meticulous detail from the Discourses which Meher Baba himself gave out.

[modifier] True Knowledge ?

May 1982

Questions sent in by readers are answered by disciples who have lived with Meher Baba

Question : When we say a man has knowledge, can we possibly conclude he has the right kind of knowledge? Do we understand what we know and can this « know » be applied in a practical way to our spiritual growth?

Answer : The history of civilization is a continuing tale of the discarding today of what had been confidently accepted yesterday as knowledge. But fortunately, what appears true of knowledge related to the external world, apparently is not necessarily true of the inner world of man himself. There is compelling evidence that, as highly motivated individuals dig deep within the world of inner experience, there is a progressive discarding and simplification which finally produces a one rock-stable result that is always identical. Equally throughout history, this final result of deepening inner knowledge has been termed God-realization or union with God. There is no way to term this state anything other than right knowledge. All knowledge up to that point is relative knowledge and liable to further modification, discard, deepened insight.

« Knowledge » is an ambiguous term in itself. Those who have apparently arrived at that one solid-rock state and have given us some description of it, all insist that it has nothing to do with mental or reasoned processes. Nor is it a collection of external observations codified and harmonized into a body of consistent facts. Moreover, they warn us repeatedly against confusing the « knowledge » of reason and even of the senses, with the inner knowledge which for them is the only knowledge.

Apparently we are all addicted through thousands and even hundreds of thousands of years of habit to identify knowledge with information recorded by the senses or produced by logic as extensions of data based on the senses. In fact, the great advance of technical civilization is based on carefully worked out principles for the handling of such sensory data. If the spectaculary advances of science and industrial technology based on them have any validity, then why should these principles not be the base also of the most meaningful form of correct human knowledge? To deny that this is so is to risk denial of the very value of modern civilization.

Yet this is close to what the witness to inner knowledge does. While often warning us not to try to cut ourselves off from the external world and its forms of shifting knowledge, he usually gives us the impression that if it has value, it is more as a laboratory or a school which can be the needed environment for uncovering the absolute and unchanging knowledge or experience of the inner man.

Let us put the matter even more clearly in the direct and simple words of Meher Baba. He says that reality is infinite, eternal, indivisible God. All else is imagination, and even the very imagination is included in the infinitude of God. All of creation and all of its Apparent forms of knowledge are contained within the zero portion of God’s infinitude and fulfil one end, which is to develop the innate consciousness of God’s knowledge of His own Godhood. This is the rock-solid, unchanging knowledge to which each iota of creation comes. All human experience revolves around one central theme, and that is the disidentification of consciousness from materiality. Put in other words, all human experience leads inexorably and inevitably to the conclusion that reality/truth/knowledge is not the external situation that we considered so important, nor our emotional complications nor even our greatest creative ideas. All of these fade gradually as does even the most beautiful evening sunset, and in their place is established the consciousness of the One, eternal, unchanging, all-encompassing as the only true Knowledge.

Meher Baba is very clear in telling us that such true Knowledge is achieved sooner or later by every drop-soul in creation. The only question is one of relative speed and complexity in achieving this realization. The fortunate one is he who, through love and loyalty to one more advanced in this process than himself (or, grace of graces ; to one who has totally achieved the realization) goes ahead rapidly and on a straight course.

Consulting Editor Naosherwan Anzar. © 1980 Zeno Publishing Services. Quotes of Meher Baba © AMBPPCT.