Kendra's Notebook

Blissful Agony

2012-01-21T16:37:00.000-05:00

The following exchangetook place at a Bhau Kalchuri Internet chat based in Chicago in 1999 (I edited it a little).

Someone online askedBhauji: “How can we tell when it’s Baba’s treatment, or it’s mental oremotional illness?”

Bhau replied: “Becausethen, when it is Baba’s treatment, the suffering is because of love. The painyou experience, it gives you joy. You want the pain and you don’t want it atthe same time. You don’t want to get rid of this pain; you want to love Himmore and more. Just like when you get itchy, you scratch, and when you scratchyou get pain, but you go on scratching because you love that pain. In the sameway, when love is there for God, then you suffer, because the longing is thereto be united with God. The fortunate ones get this blissful agony.

Take a Trip to the ‘Meher Baba's Travels’ Site

2012-01-12T13:28:00.000-05:00

Tony Zois in Australia has been gradually building a web site called Meher Baba’s Travels, with facts and images regarding Meher Baba’s trips and journeys throughout the world to spread his message of love and truth, establish personal contacts, contact spiritual “agents,” “lay cables” for his work, and go wherever his plans for the benefit of humanity took him. In addition, there are pages on Meher Baba’s Mandali and close ones, “personalities” who met him, and spiritual figures who came into contact with him. There are numerous pages that Tony began with only a few details or an image, just to get it started. Others pages have lots of images and articles. So what’s new and newsy? Here are some pages to look at:

His Close Ones —Westerners

Women:

Marie Adair

Margaret Craske (this one’s a feast)

Helen "Bunty" Kelley (Bunty Bernstein)

Men:

His Close Ones — Easterners

Men:

Abdul Kalingad (Prem Ashram boy)

Mokham Singh (with his wife, Kusum Singh)

‘Personalities’ WhoMet Meher Baba

Saint Gadge Maharaj (6^th-plane Hindu saint of Maharashtra)

William Hurlbut (playwright &screenwriter)

Imai (Japanese photographer)

Dane Rudhyar (astrologer) and his wife, Maliya Rudhyar

Max & Lillian Wardall (Theosophists; scroll down to clippings and lastarticle on their page)

Location Gallery

India

Ellora (An area in Maharashtra where Baba visited andviewed the famous caves with their stone carvings and sculptures. At the largeBuddha statue, Mani and Meheru recall Baba’s dictating on His alphabet board,“I am Buddha.”)

Meherabad,Lower

Meherabad,Upper

Nasik(A Hindu pilgrimage site on the banks of the Godavri River, Nasik was the siteof Meher Baba’s first ashram for Western disciples in 1936-1937)

USA

Myrtle Beach, SC(home of Meher Spiritual Center)

Meditations on the Ancient One: New Book by Charlie Mills

2011-12-14T19:16:00.001-05:00

Charlie Mills has published an unusual book of reproductions of his paintings, intended to be used for meditation on the Beloved. Please see my review of the book on the Love Street Breezes web site.

Phyllis Ott Tweets

2011-12-10T12:34:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I helped Phyllis Ott set up her Twitter account, and today I urged her to post her first tweet. This is what she submitted:

If you men don’t start shaving, we girls are going to stop shaving.

She elaborated: What’s with the unshaven look? She doesn’t like it. I tried to explain the evolution of grunge fashion, but she said, “They’re wearing it [the unshaven look] with tuxedos. … it’s not right. Meher Baba always had a very good shave.”

When Phyllis and her husband, Lyn Ott, met Meher Baba in India in 1965, the following exchange took place:

As Baba “spoke” through Eruch, he patted Lyn on the back. Sometimes he would caress him tenderly around his chin. Suddenly, Baba turned to Lyn and asked, “Did you shave today?” In response to his reply of yes, Baba remarked, “Well, you did not do a very good job of it! Just feel my chin.”

Baba’s face was soft and he had a splendid shave. Lyn said, “While I was shaving, I was thinking: ‘Does Baba shave?’”

Baba replied with surprise, “Why shouldn’t I shave?”

Lyn could only think to say, “Well, Baba, before this morning, I had never associated shaving with God!”

Baba looked at him seriously and stated, “I am more human than you are. Someday you will see my face as it really is.” (Lord Meher 19: 6389)

In the East, especially the Muslim world, the beard is regarded as a sign of manliness, and being clean-shaven indicates cowardliness, an allegedly feminine attribute. But the poet and Perfect Master Jalaluddin Rumi wrote (Masnavi V: 3345):

If one could become a “man” by virtue of beard and testicles,
Every buck would have sufficient hair and beard!

For Rumi, the Sufi concept of the “man of God” had nothing to do with gender, as explained by the late Annemarie Schimmel, the great scholar of Rumi (Schimmel, Rumi’s World, p. 103); thus, even a woman could be a “man” in that sense. Hazrat Babajan, the Muslim Perfect Master of Meher Baba’s time, rejected being addressed respectfully as “Mother” and insisted that she was a man.

Lord Meher reports that Baba shaved daily (2:404). Dr. Goher once told me how Baba once complained to the women mandali about the tedium of shaving, and he said that when the Avatar comes again in 700 years, it will be women who will have to shave their faces. The women mandali pleaded with Baba not to give women more troubles, since we already suffer so much with our periods and other problems. So Baba relented.

Still, I think it is wise to heed Phyllis Ott. Better get out your razors, guys, or Phyllis says that we women “will start to look like Chinese philosophers.”

Devotion: The Story of 'Portrait of Meher Baba with Dog'

2011-09-25T13:04:00.012-04:00

This is the story of how the artist Will Teather was inspired to paint his Portrait of Meher Baba with Dog. It was written by Aude Gotto:

Will Teather was selected to exhibit his work at the King of Hearts Café in Norwich in the spring of 2009. Around that time, he was offered a place on a post-graduate course at Chelsea Art School, London, and was looking for help to fund this. The exhibitions manager of the Café knew that I was involved in a charitable Trust which gave grants, and suggested he applied to this, which he duly did.

I had not met him, but from his work, which was original and skilled, if marked by a somewhat dark humour, I felt that he was a serious artist who deserved to be encouraged.

He was offered the grant, and I suggested that we met at the King of Hearts to make better acquaintance. As we were walking round the place, he stopped in front of Diana LePage’s striking oil portrait of Meher Baba, which was displayed on the staircase landing:

Portrait of Meher Baba by Diana LePage (cropped)

I explained about Meher Baba being the inspiration for the King of Hearts and particularly its name, and said a little about who he was. I had put a quote underneath the painting, found I believe in Maud Kennedy’s book The Unstruck Music of Meher Baba, which went:

“The age of the intellect has had its day.

The age of the heart is at hand,

and the Master of Silence is its Avatar.”

Suddenly Will turned round and said to me: “Would you like me to do you a portrait of Meher Baba as a thank you for the grant?”

Surprised and delighted, I said I would love this, and wondered what Baba was up to!

We then met at my house and I showed him many photographs of Baba from the book Love Personified.

He indicated that he would like to paint more of a general scene than a single portrait, as he likes to do theatrical scenes. He also likes means of transport like trains and boats. We discussed possibilities, and I said that Baba had travelled a lot so he might paint him on a boat with some animals. Will particularly liked the photo of Baba kissing a goat! He left with many photographs to work from.

Time passed, as he was busy with his course, and finally he rang me to say that the picture was ready. I was somewhat anxious, knowing that some of his pictures were rather spooky, and I hoped I would like what he had come up with. When he arrived, he said the picture had not turned out quite like what he had expected. He said: “I thought he had such a nice face that I must do a full portrait.” The inclusion of the dog was amazing, as my dog Christie, recently deceased, was very similar to the one in the picture, and Will had never seen her.

I felt that this was, in a way, a picture of Baba with me, as I identify with dogs a lot. I gave it the title Devotion, as I feel that is what dogs stand for, and also this is what the painting expresses for me.

Portrait of Meher Baba with Dog, by Will Teather (cropped)

Aude Gotto founded the King of Hearts Centre for People and the Arts in a medieval building in Norwich in 1990. Exhibitions took place in the Gallery and in the large Café, which was an integral part of the Centre. Regular concerts were performed in the Music Room. When the King of Hearts had to close for lack of funds in December 2010, Aude returned to her previous career as a psychotherapist and sees a few private clients at home. Living slowly is now part of her agenda, which involves gardening, growing vegetables, making jam, and playing the harpsichord, as well as prayer and contemplation.

The Empty Chair, by Barbara Scott

2011-08-31T18:45:00.006-04:00

The Empty Chair: Meher Baba’s 1969 Darshan
by Barbara Bamberger Scott

“TO HAVE MY REAL DARSHAN IS TO FIND ME.” —Meher Baba

In April-June 1969, an extraordinary event took place in India: the “last” Darshan of Avatar Meher Baba. The announcement had gone out to His lovers in the fall of 1968, plans for the event were made . . . and then Baba dropped His body on January 31, 1969. Yet the Avataric Show went on, and what a Show it was. Barbara Scott has woven the reminiscences of eighty people from four countries into an original, engaging, moving, and often quite funny narrative about this unforgettable experience.

“The 1969 Darshan was simply ‘too cool,’ so Avataric in its reality as to have left the questioning mind in the dust . . . so here is a chance to relive that great event, through the eyes and the ears, the thoughts and the senses — and the hearts — of some of those who were there.” —Rick Chapman

You can buy this 365-page book directly from the author. Paperback copies cost $20.00, hardback copies are $28.00, and shipping is FREE. You can pay by sending a check or money order made out to Barbara Scott, to 613 Marshall Street, Mt. Airy, NC 27030. You can also pay via Paypal, to the account of butrneggss@yahoo.com. For any sort of special arrangement, inscription, multiple orders, etc., contact Barbara at babadarshan1969@yahoo.com.

When people ask me about the 1969 Darshan, “Did you see Meher Baba?” I say, “Yes!” and then “No!” And then . . . “Yes.”
—From The Empty Chair

Also available from Barbara is her book The Golden Thread: Meher Baba, Chapel Hill, 1967, only $8.

The Empty Chair may also be purchased from Sheriar Books or Meher Baba Information.

Laurie Blum's Persian Garden

2011-08-26T17:44:00.000-04:00

“Who Do You Take Me to Be?”

2011-07-09T12:20:00.005-04:00

Guilty pleasure of a Jewish Baba-lover: watching Christian televangelists on the channels available down here in South Carolina. The good ones — Joyce Meyer, James and Betty Robison, Charles Stanley . . . and today, Saturday morning children’s puppet theater! A Sesame Street–like roving reporter-puppet with microphone seeks to ask puppet passersby with various skin colors, many of them speaking in rich Southern accents, the burning question: “Who is Jesus?” One puppet admits, “I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.” Another mistakenly thinks he is being accused of some crime and shouts, “I didn’t do it!” An upper-class white-haired lady tries to recall whether she saw Jesus’ name in the society pages of the newspaper and then remembers, “He lives in the church,” and she helpfully gives the address. Finally, one puppet declares: “Jesus is whatever and whoever you need him to be, whenever you need him.”

Sure, atheists will say that the same thing can be said about tofu, but for people of faith it’s a darn good answer.

Baba-lovers are people of faith who believe that Meher Baba is one with the Christ. We believe it partly because Meher Baba declared explicitly that he was the Avatar — the Christ, the Messiah, the Rasul — the same Ancient One come again to awaken the world. Another reason why we believe it is that we deeply intuit and somehow are given the grace to recognize that he is the Christ. Some may even have felt Baba’s Christhood confirmed “in spirit,” as Darwin Shaw did: “I felt that he was truly the Christ and that I had been born to serve him. … At that time I thought of and visualized the Christ in the traditional Christian way, as Jesus. However, I did not expect him to return in the body he used in Galilee so long ago. Thus far, I had not seen his present form nor any pictures of him, but I was extremely anxious to get to him as soon as possible. After he came to me in spirit, I felt that I should go immediately in search of him” (Darwin Shaw, As Only God Can Love).

Learning from a newspaper article about Meher Baba’s presence in America, Darwin eventually arrived at the object of his search. Of his meeting with Baba in New York City in 1934, when they gazed into each other’s eyes, Darwin wrote: “For me, it was an indescribably glorious moment. This was our first glimpse into the infinite pools of Divine Love that were Meher Baba’s eyes. His handshake might have reached down through some two thousand years to clasp mine at that moment. I saw him as the Christ, and no words can adequately describe what poured forth from my heart as I recognized the Beloved — the living Christ. I felt instant rapport with him and experienced a great spiritual upliftment. It was like the fulfillment of an ‘impossible dream.’ I was overjoyed. Baba’s Beauty, the sweetness of his love, which could not be expressed in words — the joy, the sparkling wonder of his Being! One could not prefigure him. One could not imagine how it would be, what he would be like. He was more than one could imagine — much more, immeasurably more.”

Countess Nadine Tolstoy also experienced an awakening to Meher Baba’s identity on her first encounter with him: “I saw Christ before me . . . in the expression of all His figure and His divinely lit-up face, in His eyes beaming love.” Indeed, Meher Baba told an Indian newspaper reporter: “I am the Christ, the personification of love.”

Baba has said that only relatively few recognize the Avatar while he is on earth — which I take to include what he called the “Avataric period,” the 100 years following his death when his presence and influence on earth are felt just as strongly as when he was in the body . . . whereafter they gradually wane until it becomes necessary for the Avatar to take birth once again. (Of course, the Avatar is never away or apart from us, even during the “darker” ages; he is that aspect of God who is always in conscious contact with humanity, ever guiding and responsive.) Baba said that in the future the whole world will come to him (just as the masses eventually came to the previous Avataric Advents); but blessed are those who recognize him now. To be able to recognize the Avatar is his gift to us. How, otherwise, could we ordinary people distinguish between a worldly person of outstanding goodness, a pretend saint, a genuine saint, a Perfect One, or the Highest of the High, the Christ?

Numerous accounts are given of how Baba would frequently ask his lovers, “Who do you take me to be?” For example, Raj Khilnani reports that Baba would ask him and his brother Vinod, “Who am I? Who do you take me to be?” They would say, “You are God.” Baba said, “Are you just talking with your lips, or do you really feel it in your heart?” Raj replied, “Baba, I feel it in my heart.” Raj reports that Baba asked this question many times. This is just one of many such exchanges recounted in the Baba literature. It tells us that Meher Baba wants us to know and remember and feel in our hearts that he is the Christ, God in human form. In a moment of doubt, Bili Eaton once asked Baba, “Baba, are you my Master?” Baba replied, “Master? I am your God!”

Meher Baba has said that as there is only one God, therefore there is only one Avatar, one Christ, one Holy Prophet, but he comes in different forms, at different times, in different parts of the world, always with one aim: to redeem humanity when it loses its purpose and goes astray; and always, as God in human form, he suffers infinitely, though he is the source of all happiness.

Meher Baba does not “replace” the previous Avatars, each of whom has his own identity and personality (though through all the advents the Christ displays certain recognizable attributes). The scholar Charles Purdom (1883-1965) has given an informed opinion of the relationship between Meher Baba and Jesus Christ, which is worth reading in its entirety in his book The God-Man, available for free download at the AMB Trust site and in a print edition newly reissued by Sheriar Foundation and for sale at Sheriar Books. In a letter to Jane Barry Haynes upon the publication of The God-Man in 1964, Purdom confided that the second part of the book (discussing the issues raised by Baba’s claim) was the most difficult for him, but that on the whole he was pleased with it, helping him to clear up his own thought about Meher Baba as the God-Man (Jane Barry Haynes, Letters of Love for Meher Baba, p. 317).

Here is an excerpt from that second part of The God-Man:

***

It seems to me that to see the way of Jesus in Baba or the way of Baba in Jesus is not to diminish Jesus or to suppose that Baba is a substitute for him in any way whatever. Jesus cannot be replaced. Whatever has been thought from time to time in periods of stress, or whatever has been declared in the face of heresy, the Christian mystics have never supposed that while Jesus Christ is the way he alone as a historical figure is the only way: his way is the only way, but his way has been in the world from the beginning: the way of obedience, sacrifice and love. I understand Baba to mean this when he reminds Christians who come to him that they should practise their own religion. Sometimes people are confused about this, because it seems that in Jesus and Baba they have two Masters — the same question arises in India as between Krishna and Baba — but there is no dilemma if it be realized that the Masters are one. There is no obligation to choose one and reject the other. Jesus said that no one can serve two masters, when he was contrasting God and Mammon, but he was not telling his fellow Jews to give up their way or worship, or the Samaritans theirs, or the Greeks theirs, when he said “Follow me.”

How then should we understand the relation of Baba to Jesus? This appears to be as difficult a question as that of the relation of religions with each other. When one is committed to a particular religion, as indeed one must be to be able to appreciate the inwardness of religion at all, it is hard to avoid a somewhat equivocal attitude towards other religions; one seems bound to assert that one’s own religion is in some way superior to or more complete than others. The best treatment of the subject known to me is contained in the works of the Swiss scholar, Fruthjof Schuon, in particular, The Transcendent Unity of Religions (1953). An excellent discussion on the God-Man is by the Russian Vladimir Soloryer (1853-1900) in Lectures on God-Manhood (1878). The subject has certainly not been ignored by others, whose conclusions, however, I find uneasy. Fruthjof Schuon is Christian, Protestant, with a profound knowledge of Islam and Eastern religions, while Soloryer was Christian Orthodox with a deep knowledge of the Eastern and Roman theologies and some knowledge of Eastern religions; I refer the reader to their books. Schuon says: “If Christ had been the only manifestation of the Word, supposing such uniqueness of manifestation to be possible, the effect of His birth would have been the instantaneous reduction of the universe to ashes.”

My own conclusion is that no satisfactory answer to the question of the relation between Jesus and Baba is possible unless we can agree that both manifest the same Eternal Consciousness; they are not identical persons, neither are they repetitions of each other: the work of each is unique. Therefore, to suppose that Baba is the Palestinian Jesus come again, is a fundamental error.

There are pictures [photos] of Baba in which he is represented as the suffering Jesus, as there are pictures of him as Krishna. This kind of devotion is sometimes to be found in the treatment of the lives of Christian saints, in particular St. Francis of Assisi, whose life has been presented in such a way as to resemble the life of Christ. Dante himself is not innocent of this, for he found in St. Francis, to use Baron von Hügel’s words, “the reproduction of the divine paradox of the life of Jesus.” It is true that the Christian does aim to be, as Kierkegaard said, “contemporaneous with Christ,” but that does not mean that he repeats in himself the life of Christ, which was once for all, but that he sees with Christ’s eyes the reality of God in the changing and imperfect world. It is a fact that to see Baba walking through the streets of Indian villages, when he gives darshan, is to see what is not unlike what must have taken place when Jesus walked in Judea and Galilee. In the same way the people press upon him, mothers carry their children, the old and the diseased strive to get near him, the disciples push the people back, making way, he stopping them, beckoning to the mothers and children, touching them, and giving blessing. … In a sense this is Christ come again, I have said to myself. Yet to think of Baba as the ‘Second Coming’ in the Christian sense, as I have found people do, is to misinterpret that extremely subtle doctrine, which certainly does not mean in any literal sense that Jesus will come again as he was before, as though it were necessary for his humanness to be recognized again; his second coming is “in glory.” Besides, Jesus did appear “in glory” after his death, to his friends, when the sensuous nature (man) was manifested in the spiritual (God), upon which faith the Christian Church was founded.

The God-Man is the exteriorization of the divine inwardness, the manifestation in visible sensual form of transcendent Godhead. He presents man in his relation to that which is beyond Nature and presents God in him. In him is reconciled the Eastern conception of identity between the human and the divine with the Western conception of unity. As God is more than the God of this world, so the God-Man is more than the Man of this world. Indeed, his light is for the entire creation, not simply our galaxy but the infinite galaxies: for him “the whole creation travails in pain.”

Announcing the New "Love Street Breezes"

2011-04-17T15:04:00.007-04:00

On behalf of Dina Snow Gibson and staff, I am happy to announce that a new publication, Love Street Breezes, has been launched, in the tradition of the old Love Street LampPost. Please read this message from Dina explaining the change, send in your subscriptions, and "like" us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/LoveStreetBreezes.
Get the debut issue of Breezes for FREE as a pdf here.
--Kendra Crossen

Is there a breeze in the realm of love
That does not bear the scent of life from Your tresses?
—Sana’i

Dina writes:

Last year, I and the entire LampPost staff resigned from the Love Street LampPost magazine, due to disagreements with the board of directors of the Los Angeles Meher Baba Center. However, our new magazine, Love Street Breezes, now independently published by the 501 (c) 3 Love Street Press, will still be bringing you Baba news from around the world; messages from the Avatar of the Age; reminiscences of the Mandali; stories written by our readers about their life with the Beloved; Humor for Huma; the Children’s Page; and information on meetings held at Meher Baba centers around the world, along with many photos of Meher Baba that you may not have seen before.

The reason for the name change? We wanted to make a clean break with the past, and when we learned that in Persian poetry “breezes” are symbolic messengers bearing good news from God, we fell in love with the word. How very appropriate! Since all we have is the 2009 subscriber’s mailing addresses, and knowing how often so many of you move, I will need all of you—who want to subscribe to Breezes—to send me your current address. You may use fax: 310-839-BABA (2222); phone: 310-837-6419 (9-5 Pacific time); email: dinagibson@mac.com; or postal mail (see address below). As long as we have sufficient donations from your subscriptions, we hope to have this magazine ready for you by May.

I feel so very sorry for those of you who sent in a subscription to the Love Street LampPost last year and yet have received no magazines for 2010. I am afraid it is totally out of my hands. I gave all the LampPosts to the Board of Directors at the L.A. Center, since I was told the magazines and the subscription payments belonged to them. It is up to the Board of Directors to mail the magazines out. However, the board did offer to return your subscription payments if you so desired. To this end, you could write to the secretary, Rosie Choi, choirosie@verizon.net in order to submit your request. As with the LampPost, we will never deny anyone a subscription to Love Street Breezes. If the suggested donation of $25 a year, which we hope will cover printing and postage, is a financial hardship for you, just let us know you would definitely like to receive the magazine and we will get it to you, through Baba’s grace.There are some very generous people who can afford to donate sufficient to cover these subscriptions. So give from your heart, whatever feels right to you.

Because postage is so high, we have to ask overseas subscribers for $35, which for many countries simply covers the postage. However, we can email you a PDF version of the magazine if you would prefer, as long as you have hi speed internet connections (cable or broadband), since sometimes the magazine is around 10 mb.

Domestic subscriptions can be paid for by credit card. If you prefer to send a check, please make it out to Love Street Press, and send to Dina Gibson, 8906 David Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90034-2006. Overseas subscribers, please use credit card payments only, unless you have a check drawn on a U.S. bank account.

We do hope to hear from all our dear readers as soon as possible so that you may soon catch the Divine Scent of His Breezes.

In His love and service,
Dina Snow Gibson and the Love Street Breezes crew

Baba and Egypt

2011-02-02T18:18:00.007-05:00

Meher Baba visited Egypt a number of times. This important country is a link not only to the Arab world and Israel but to the entire African continent. "On July 23 [1952], a coup d'état had taken place in Egypt. Meher Baba had been continually stressing that he wished to land in Cairo to contact a mast [advanced soul], but now he was forced to change his plans. He turned to John Bass and remarked, 'The revolution in Egypt is John's fault.'"—Lord Meher (Filis Frederick noted Baba's habit of jokingly blaming people that was a cryptic sign of his inner work.) Contact me if you would like to see more commentary.

Participate in the Meherabad Wiki

2011-01-14T08:50:00.004-05:00

Check out the Meherabad Wiki. It's a site for all who visit or reside in Meherabad. You can find information there and you can also help by sharing what you know. Quoting from the home page:

The mission of this wiki is to build community through freely sharing information.

This site has NO RELATIONSHIP to the Avatar Meher Baba PPC Trust.
This wiki exists to serve all who reside in or visit Meherabad.
Everyone may add to, change, or update the content.
Please share this location freely and participate all you can.

The wiki managers for now are Kathy Hill (kathill777 [at] gmail.com), Shami Shaligram, and Joe Disabatino.

Additional management assistance is most welcome.
There is much to know about living here. Share what you have learned.
Anything you think is useful or interesting can have a page.
It is OK and even encouraged to include "commercial" information: buy things, sell things, recommend vendors or sources or warn us of places/services to avoid!

Remembering Yvonne

2011-01-08T15:57:00.007-05:00

This post consists of a revised account I wrote on Facebook of the memorial gathering held for Yvonne; the obituary that her daughter read out at the gathering; a reminiscence written and read out by her sister Robine (Robi), and some thoughts from Nikos Colias.

Notes on the Memorial Gathering for Yvonne Andrau

by Kendra Crossen Burroughs

I read in a book about the yogic view of dying that “the last moments of a saint reflect his entire life.”

The report of Yvonne Andrau’s death in a road accident on Wednesday, December 29, in the local Sun News newspaper said that she ran off the side of the road and lost control of her vehicle. It did not mention that she had swerved to avoid hitting two dogs who were fighting on the road. Whether or not Yvonne was a saint, her final moment was a selfless act of seeking to protect two living beings. In addition, Yvonne was alone in the car and it was a one-car accident, and her daughter, Christina Riley, said, “It was so like my mother not to involve or hurt anyone else.”

The final words of the article were: “Andrau was not wearing a seat belt at the time of the crash.” No mention of the fact that Yvonne had medical permission not to wear a seat belt because of her dialysis port. (She was on the way to dialysis at the time of the accident.)
Christina explained these details to a huge group gathered on Sunday, January 2, 2011, in Briarcliffe (Myrtle Beach). I tried to count those present in the living room and stopped at 60; there might have been nearly 100 present, mainly from the Meher Baba community (nearby residents and Meher Center guests) and Yvonne’s family, including her son, Demian Riley, and her two sisters, Maya and Robi.

The youth who was the sole witness apparently had said that the accident was over in seconds, and according to the police it was believed that Yvonne was dead before the vehicle even came to rest. This fact had caused some unease in Christina, who was concerned that Yvonne had had no time for any thought other than surprise. But something happened to Christina that answered this doubt: while she was driving, a deer suddenly jumped out into the road in front of her. The incident made her realize how much time there actually was for her to think — “about anything I wanted to.” Tearfully Christina said she now felt confident that Yvonne had taken a moment to remember Meher Baba before she breathed her last.

It was touching that among those at the gathering were the boy who witnessed the accident, along with his mother. He had called his mother, a nurse, to the scene when it happened, and she told us that she had reported to the EMT’s that the victim was in her 30s or 40s. During the sharing of memories of Yvonne, many mentioned the timeless quality of this woman who, at 76 years, seemed so young and vital. The funeral director was said to be shocked when he learned her age.

It was recalled with fondness that Yvonne was very proud of her hair, which she had never dyed. She also had pride in her considerable ability and knowledge in many areas, such as construction, electrician’s work, repairs, and other skills requiring strength and skill. Not only was she handy with power tools but she was also a beautiful, feminine woman who performed with a belly dancing group in full costume. Yvonne was always learning about new fields and the latest findings in them. After many people had commented on this point, citing anecdotes about Yvonne’s superior know-how (not to mention that she often proclaimed her know-how to be superior), Bob Cushman brought down the house by calling out to someone, “Didn’t Yvonne do brain surgery on you?”

Yvonne was warmly remembered as a loving mother, grandmother, and caregiver (e.g., to Gladys Spratt in her last illness), and last but not least as a mystic. Ira Shader shared one visionary dream she had told him, in which, on parallel staircases, she came face to face with lionesses whom she knew to be Mehera and Mani, and a massive lion who was Meher Baba—and when they roared at her, she roared right back!

More details about Yvonne’s adventurous life (which included the traumatic experience of being held in a Japanese internment camp during the war, along with her two younger sisters and mother, the latter having written about it in a book titled Bowing to Fate) are given in the obituary below, which Christina read out at the gathering.

I conclude with this memorable comment from Robi’s reminiscence (which follows the obit below): “In her own mind, she could swallow the world.”

Yvonne Judith Andrau

Yvonne Judith Andrau, 76, died in a car accident on December 29, 2010. She was born in Dortmund, Germany, in 1934, the oldest of three children, and was already a world traveler at the age of seven, having lived in Germany, Hungary, Sweden, India, and Indonesia. She, along with her family, spent World War II as a prisoner of the Japanese military in Indonesia. After being liberated in 1945, she came to America. She lived in Texas, California, and Illinois until she finally settled with her family in Woodstock, NY. She was educated at Wheaton College and the University of Aix-en-Provence in France, and then Columbia University in New York City, where she earned her degree and started her career as a physical therapist.

Her life was to change significantly when she discovered the spiritual master Meher Baba in 1955. Shortly after, in 1957, she married Thomas Riley. Hers was an entrepreneurial life, including a highly successful antique store and a land development and custom home building business. Wherever she lived, she was hostess to countless people who were becoming newly acquainted with Meher Baba. She and her husband acted as an informal center for gatherings in New York State for decades.

Meher Baba gave Yvonne and her husband permission to live on his Spiritual Center, located in Myrtle Beach, SC, and to design and build their home there. It was not until 1976 that she and her husband moved to Myrtle Beach, to expand their building business. Yvonne remained there for the rest of her life. In Myrtle Beach she had an active involvement in the community focused around the Center.

Yvonne is dearly remembered by those associated with the Center, and in the greater area community as a selfless, practical, active, adventurous, and determined lover of God. She was a self-taught electrician, house designer, gardener, and belly dancer. She was a fearless maverick and tackled all projects with gusto. She leaves behind her daughter Christina Riley of New Bern, NC; her son Demian Riley, his wife Heather, and their daughter, Alexandra, in Loris, SC; her two sisters, Maya Andrau of Asheville, NC, and Robine Andrau of North Scituate, MA, as well as four nephews and nieces, and countless friends worldwide whose life she has touched in so many ways.

My Sister Yvonne

by Robine Andrau, 12/30/10

My sister Yvonne died yesterday, the victim of her kind heart. She was trying to avoid hitting two dogs that were crossing the main highway. She swerved to the right, overcompensated when she swerved back, and lost control of her car as it spun around like a whirling dervish. In a blink of an eye, the metal monster snuffed out her life.

And what a life she’d lived. A rich one when you tally up the experiences she’d had, the people she’d gotten to know and befriend, the many countries she’d traveled to and lived in, the jobs she’d had, and the adversities she’d encountered.

I remember her twisting her thick, long, dark hair into a coil and pinning it on top of her head as she talked about her experience roughing it on a mountain in Ojai.

“I was a real gypsy,” she said with relish, enjoying the hardship of no running water, of peeing in the scrub vegetation, of cooking over an open fire. “I should have been born a man,” she told me, taking pride in her strength, her ability, her prowess.

And then, when she’d moved back to Myrtle Beach, she was not shy about expounding on her skills in wiring, plumbing, designing houses, gardening, building, nutrition. She had done it all and could do it all. We knew it was true, but wondered why you would want to.

She was a fearless maverick, taking pride in her uniqueness. In her own mind, she could swallow the world. When some plan didn’t work out, she didn’t beat her head against the wall, but devised another plan. And always there was the shimmering idea of what she would do to fix up her mobile home. Each aspect of the fixing up hinged on some previous step that had to be accomplished first.

In the telling, her tongue savored the steps to get from A to Z, Z being the acme of perfection, which was to add another bathroom and living/kitchen area with its own entrance, a separate wing that she could rent out. And then, with that assured income, she would finally be able to breathe a little easier financially. Unfortunately, she never got beyond Step A.

Although those of us stuck with our heavy feet in the solid dirt of reality might try to point out to Yvonne some more doable way of achieving her goal, she was her own person and insisted on doing things her way. And who can blame her? When you don’t have much, the one thing you do have is the ability to say NO and to retain control over how you envisage your own destiny.
And that is exactly what she did when we clucked around her this past summer and fall, pushing her to work on the necessary repairs to make her mobile home habitable for the coming cold of winter. She dug in her heels because what she wanted to do was work in her garden.

So she did and perhaps that is for the best. She enjoyed the last few months of her life doing what she loved to do. By saving the dogs she sacrificed herself but also, ironically, she avoided facing the cold of winter in her impossible, beloved mobile home.

May she know that despite our exasperation with her at times, we all loved her and wished her nothing but the best with our suggestions and advice.

And may the irises, and tulips, and lilies bloom profusely in, and the weeds know to stay out of, her heavenly garden.

A Remembrance of Yvonne Andrau

by Nikos Colias

I've known Yvonne since 1967, though saw her infrequently the past several years. My main memories of her center about many wonderful conversations. Her rapid-fire mind would cover the whole map from survivalism to UFO's, from gardening to community, with hardly a pause. Her enthusiasm for these and related topics was evident, and she was always eager to share the latest developments. This contributed to quite a speedy delivery that could be hard to keep up with at times.

But when Meher Baba was talked about, her enthusiasm was boundless. She would be completely focused and single-minded. She was fully anchored in her Beloved, rock-solid and wholehearted. A wonderful atmosphere would often be evoked, and these are my most vivid memories of Yvonne.

Several times lately, when thinking of Yvonne, I can see her smiling, extremely happy. I've had the same feeling of that atmosphere we shared in some of those past conversations. I'm sure she's experiencing that inner community of souls converging on the Beloved's garden.

Sculpted with Love

2010-12-24T20:06:00.007-05:00

This week a commemorative coin was released for Prince William and Kate Middleton's engagement, but the portraits, especially Kate's, were criticized for not resembling the young couple. No doubt it takes great skill to cast an accurate likeness in metal bas relief.

This news item caused me to remember Vivian Agostini (1902-1999), a gifted sculptor who did succeed in capturing the living beauty of Avatar Meher Baba’s profile in a bronze medallion.

Vivian was born Ida Losh in Russia in 1902. Her husband, Louis Agostini, was a secretary to Paul Brunton, the mystic who wrote negatively about Baba in his book A Search in Secret India, so Louis was initially skeptical about Baba. But after visiting Meher Center and reading Listen, Humanity and The Wayfarers, both he and Vivian were drawn into the Beloved’s orbit.

Louis described himself as a “Sunday painter,” but Vivian was a professional sculptor specializing in portraiture. Among her works is a masterful bronze bust of Elizabeth Patterson at Meher Center in Myrtle Beach. According to Louis, Elizabeth had sought Baba’s approval for the inscription at the base of the sculpture, “Elizabeth, Disciple of Baba”; Baba corrected it to read: “Elizabeth, Disciple of Meher Baba.”

When the 1962 East-West Gathering was announced, Louis was ready to go to India, but Vivian insisted she could not bow down to any man who called himself God. She changed her mind after Louis received a message from Baba saying he was happy that “at least one of you” was coming—yet they had not told Baba there were two of them!

Vivian’s first meeting with Baba upset her because Baba had barely looked at her (she thought at least he would compliment her on her bust of Elizabeth!); she wanted to go back to New York, but Louis helped her calm down. At the next gathering it was announced that there would be no more introductions or private meetings with Baba. But then Rano brought the message that Baba wanted to see Vivian Agostini! Baba indicated that he wanted to give Vivian a special embrace, but she could not accept it. She sank to her knees, telling Baba in tears how much she loved him. (And he did embrace her after all.)

After returning to New York, Vivian decided to sculpt the medallion in commemoration of this experience. The design was approved by Baba, and the medal was struck in 1964. It was reissued in 1994 in honor of Baba’s 100th birthday, and I received one as a gift, shown here in silver.

A Seaside Monument

2010-12-01T09:50:00.004-05:00

A friend drew my attention to this distinctive sand sculpture (creators unknown) that appeared near the entrance to the Meher Center beach (photo taken 28 November). It's skillfully made and has primal appeal — cone-shaped monuments, burial mounds, and dwellings are an architectural archetype that must go back to very ancient times. It's as if the power of the circle ascends, becoming more and more concentrated until it culminates in a point. Sea, earth, and sky are united in a symbol of beautiful simplicity. But even without this bit of "art criticism," the sculpture makes a perfect ephemeral monument for the unmarked seaside gateway to Meher Baba's Home in the West.

A Million-Dollar Question

2010-11-07T14:09:00.006-05:00

Q&A Excerpt from Bhau Kalchuri’s Internet Chat, Sunday, 7 November 2010

Sister Mahoo from L.A.: Dearest Bhauji, it so good to see your lovely face and watch your humor. You look strong and we thank Baba for that. Bhauji, I have a million-dollar question. How can one love Baba more and think less of “me” as false self? Much love to you.

Bhau Kalchuri: My Sister Mahoo, your question is very simple; it is not difficult. This is a very good question. Very good question! And because you are feeling that, that’s why you are asking. How fortunate you are, that whatever you say, you are 100% right, and your question has the answer. And what is that answer?: “O Baba, O Baba, You are me, but I don’t experience, so please tell me, at midnight, so people may sleep at that time. So I will hear the answer clearly.” And then Baba will tell you. Why I am telling this to you? Because I also got the answer at midnight. I had asked Him, and He said, “Do you know? You are talking with Me, and I am hearing. I am deaf, but I hear clearly, so I am giving you the right answer. So don’t worry. Whatever you want, I am giving you.” And that’s why now my belief in Him is 100% So I don’t have any other thought. Only one thought: So Hum. I experience. So what is there to experience? This is the real thing. . . .

Sister Mahoo: Thank you, dearest Bhauji. Your answer touches my heart. Aren’t we fortunate to have you? Thank you for sharing Baba’s love with us so tirelessly and selflessly. May Baba keep you well and strong always.

Interpretation by KC

Meher Baba says, “Think of Me more than you think of your own self.” How can we do that? Mahoo’s question has been asked many times by Baba-lovers, and now Bhauji gives an interesting new answer to it.

First, Bhau identifies at the heart of the question the need for an experience. We know intellectually that our own real self is identical with the one Divine Self who is personified by Avatar Meher Baba (“You are me”), and that the ego-self is false; we know that because He tells us so. But we do not experience it. So this is the experience that Bhau says Mahoo and we are asking for.

How do we get the experience? We ask Him for it, at “midnight,” when “people” are asleep and we will be able to hear His answer. Does Bhau mean that we should literally pray to Baba at midnight? Maybe. Or maybe we can go to the “midnight” within, a place that some people call meditation, a place of emptiness and silence, where all that is false has died down and we can hear Him and He can hear us.

Bhau says that he did this himself. He asked Baba, and he got the answer — not only to that question, but to everything (“Whatever you want, I am giving you”). And because of that, his belief is 100% and he has only one thought: So Hum, “I experience.”

Often spelled Soham, this expression is a Sanskrit mantra usually translated “I am He” (sometimes “I am That”), in which “He” refers to Brahman, the Absolute, the Ultimate Reality, or what many people might call “God.”

Soham is equivalent, Bhau says, to “I experience.” Jonathan thought it was really interesting that this is how Bhauji translated Soham. And indeed that is the experience Bhau is talking about: the experience of union and identity with “the real thing,” which is the aim of life and the Supreme Goal of all creation.

It is said in Advaita (Nondualist) Vedanta that twenty-four hours a day, an individual soul is unconsciously repeating the japa of Soham, “I am He,” through the in and out of the breath: “As we inhale, we make the sound so, and as we exhale, ham. At the rate of fifteen times per minute, which is the average rate of breathing, each person is unconsciously repeating the So’ham 21,600 times daily,” wrote the late Swami Adiswarananda in his book Meditation and Its Practices (which I copy edited for the Swami, so I had the quote handy!). The Swami added, “The saying So’ham, meaning ‘I am He,’ is really an answer to the question ‘Koham?’ or ‘Who am I?’”

Meher Baba presented this same universal question and answer in his teaching in God Speaks:

Attainment of the divine goal would mean that at this stage God-in-man, through the gradual process of involution of consciousness, should eventually experience the passing-away-in that original divine sound sleep state of absolute vacuum while retaining the legacy of the full consciousness which has been gained. Thus God would be able to realize His eternal “I am God” state consciously. Whereupon, attaining His original state consciously, God would experience His own divine eternal existence and His own divine nature which is the Everything — infinite and real; and so at last get the real answer to His First Word or question of “Who am I?” as “I am God.”

as well as in messages such as the following one given for the forty-first anniversary of His Silence:

God’s first Word was “Who am I?” God’s last Word is “I Am God.” And the Word that I the God-Man will utter soon will be the sound of My infinite Silence. [The Life Circulars of Avatar Meher Baba, p. 133]

In the quote above from God Speaks, Meher Baba refers to God-realization — the experience “I am He” or “I am God”— as being fully conscious in sound sleep. Could “sound sleep” be the “midnight” that Bhau referred to?

Bhauji has said something very profound, in simple words, in loving response to Mahoo and us. She asked how we could stop thinking of ourselves less and think more of Him. And in answer, Bhau has not merely given tips such as looking at Baba’s photo or repeating His name, although those too might be good answers. Instead, he has taken her straight to the top! And he says “it is not difficult.” I think he gave a really beautiful answer.

The Ocean of Love

2010-08-24T10:07:00.005-04:00

"The Ocean of Love" is a popular song among Baba-lovers. Here you can listen to the song sung by the Baba-lover who wrote it, Bob Holdt (died 1997), accompanying himself on the autoharp. There's an article about Bob and how he was inspired to write the song here.

The Bhagavad Gita: A Beloved Book of the Avatar’s Guidance

2010-07-28T15:33:00.003-04:00

A version of this article appeared in 2001 in the Love Street LampPost. I have edited it slightly and added a list of quotes.

You don’t have to be a Hindu to love the Bhagavad Gita, the “Song of God”—a sacred scripture that was born in ancient India but belongs to the whole world and to all times. Every Indian knows the Gita, and devout Hindus read or recite it daily, yet spiritual aspirants of other traditions also appreciate its universal message.

Krishna himself assures us in the Gita that whoever reads it with faith—and teaches it to other devotees of the Lord—will be blessed. It was therefore with a few tears of happiness that I received the opportunity to share my own appreciation of the Gita with others. An editor friend asked me if I wanted to contribute a book to a new series he had developed for SkyLight Paths Publishing in Vermont. The series, called SkyLight Illuminations, consists of classics of the world’s spiritual traditions, with facing pages of commentary designed for first-time readers of the texts. Which text would I like to do? Without hesitation I chose the Bhagavad Gita, which I had been reading periodically over the past thirty years. I still had a treasured, well-thumbed copy of a prose translation by Shri Purohit Swami that I had bought in 1970. How lucky I was to take this opportunity.

Although I am not a scholar, a student of Sanskrit, or an authority on Hinduism, I was confident that my love of the subject matter, my wide reading, my skills as a professional book editor with a specialty in religion—and especially my appreciation of the text as a Baba-lover—would enable me to compile simple yet significant annotations to the Gita. Besides, the primary appeal of the Gita is to the ordinary person rather than the monk or the scholar. I hoped that my annotations would help demonstrates how anyone can approach this ancient wisdom as a matter of practical spirituality.

I happily set about ordering up a storm on the Internet—everything from the detailed multivolume commentaries of Sri Aurobindo, Paramahansa Yogananda, and Eknath Easwaran to the 32-page Indian comic-book retelling of the Gita. My plan was to compile simple annotations to the Purohit prose translation with which I was so familiar. I also drew on numerous other translations by both gurus and secular scholars, as well as the writings of spiritual luminaries including Shankara, Ramanuja, Jnaneshwar (the young Perfect Master of 13th-century Maharashtra whose “retelling” of the Gita Meher Baba had read out on a special occasion by his disciple known as Kalemama), Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Srila Prabhupada (founder of the Hare Krishna movement), Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and of course Meher Baba. I sought to point out some of the notable philosophical ideas, the symbolism, and interpretations of prominent commentators, as well as highlight passages of inspirational and practical significance.

I hope that people who read my book, Bhagavad Gita: Annotated & Explained, will be moved to further study and contemplation of this great treasure of world spiritual literature. And I especially hope that Baba-lovers will feel, as I did, the familiar presence of our Beloved in the teachings of Lord Krishna. They will be pleased to see numerous quotes from Meher Baba in the annotations.

The series editor is Andrew Harvey, who contributed a very nice introduction.

Below are some quotable sayings of Lord Krishna.

Sayings of Krishna from the Bhagavad Gita

Spirituality is the real art of living. [2.50]

The Spirit kills not, nor is It killed. It was not born; It will never die: nor once having been, can It ever cease to be: Unborn, Eternal, Ever-enduring, yet Most Ancient, the Spirit dies not when the body is dead. [2.19-20]

As the ignorant act because of their fondness for action, so should the wise act without such attachment, fixing their eyes only on the welfare of the world. [3.25]

It is better to do one’s own duty, however defective it may be, than to follow the duty of another, however well one may perform it. He who does his duty, as his own nature reveals it, never sins. [18.47]

Renunciation of action and the path of right action both lead to the highest; of the two, right action is the better. [5.2]

Let your acts be done without attachment, as sacrifice only. [3.9]

Neither in this world nor elsewhere is there any happiness in store for him who always doubts. [4.40]

Constant yearning for the knowledge of Self, and pondering over the lessons of the great Truth--this is Wisdom, all else ignorance [13.11]

He who can see the Supreme Lord in all beings, the Imperishable amidst the perishable, he it is who really sees. [13.27]

That Highest God, in Whom all beings abide, and Who pervades the entire universe, is reached only by whole-hearted devotion. [8.22]

Fools disregard Me, seeing Me clad in human form. They know not that in My higher nature I am the Lord God of all. [9.11]

I am the Father of the universe and its Mother. [9.17]

Whenever spirituality decays and materialism is rampant, then I reincarnate Myself. To protect the righteous, to destroy the wicked, and to establish the kingdom of God, I am reborn from age to age. [4.7-8]

Whatever you do, whatever you eat, whatever you sacrifice and give, whatever austerities you practice, do all as an offering to Me. [9.27]

Verily those who love the spiritual wisdom as I have taught, whose faith never fails, and who concentrate their whole nature on Me, they indeed are My most beloved. [12.20]

Dedicate yourself to Me, worship Me, sacrifice all for Me, prostrate yourself before Me, and to Me you shall surely come. Truly do I pledge to you: you are My own beloved. [18.65]

Whosoever at the time of death thinks only of Me, and thinking thus leaves the body and goes forth, assuredly he will know Me. [8.5]

I am the source of all; from Me everything flows. Therefore the wise worship Me with unchanging devotion. [10.8]

A Definition of AVATAR

2010-07-05T09:43:00.002-04:00

From the Dictionary of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1966):

AVATARA. One in whom the Divine Consciousness has descended into human birth for a world-work; the Incarnation; Spirit descending into man; Descent into form; the revelation of the Godhead in humanity; the Divine who has descended into the human consciousness; coming down of the Divine below the line which divides the divine from the human world or status.

An Avatar, roughly speaking, is one who is conscious of the presence and power of the Divine born in him or descended into him governing from within his will and life action; he feels identified inwardly with this divine power and presence.

He is a realiser, an establisher—not of outward things only, though he does realize something in the outward also, but of something essential and radical needed for the terrestrial evolution, which is the evolution of the embodied spirit through successive stages towards the Divine.

There are two sides of the phenomenon of avatarhood, the Divine Consciousness and the instrumental personality in Nature under the conditions of Nature, which it uses according to the rules of the game.

The Avatar takes upon himself the nature of humanity in his instrumental parts, though the consciousness acting behind is divine.

Meher Baba on Sri Aurobindo, from Lord Meher 10: 3659—

“. . . At lunchtime [Dec. 5, 1950] all were eager to at least know the cricket match score, but Baba's mood precluded turning on the radio. Suddenly, Baba himself wondered how the match was going, and asked that the radio be turned on. The first thing they heard was the news of the death of Aurobindo Ghoshe the previous night at 1:30 A.M. Only then did everyone grasp the reason for Baba's mood. In the past, Baba had once mentioned that Aurobindo Ghoshe was a yogi who had advanced himself by his own efforts to the sixth plane and become a saint. He now called for Aurobindo's photograph and placed it before him as he listened to accounts of his life on the radio. "I was pushing him from the sixth to the seventh plane," he later explained to Adi.

Lord Meher footnote: Meher Baba discouraged the reading of other Masters' and saints' works unless he instructed one to do so, such as certain Vedanta and Sufi works. However, at one point, Adi K. Irani was drawn to the writings of Aurobindo. On one occasion, Baba caught him reading a book of Aurobindo's and confronted him: "What have you to do with saints? You have me — the Avatar! Throw all those books away!" Adi complied with Baba's request.

Daaman Grip

2010-06-26T07:56:00.005-04:00

Daaman Grip by Tricia Migdoll
Oil on canvas, 52cm x 70cm

Jim Migdoll sent me this painting by his wife, Tricia Migdoll. He said, it was "based on a dream Tricia had when we were going through a really tough time. When she finished it, both of us were sort of blown away, and Tricia has hung it above her bed ever since.

"So back then (maybe 5 years ago?) she put it up on an art site she subscribes to and asked the members what they thought it might mean. I was so completely astounded by these two responses. Just couldn't believe what these two artists said ... knowing nothing about Baba or Tricia's relationship to Him! In fact,she didn't even know these two people."

These are the two responses:

Biki, you've outdone your self on this one. WOW!!!! As far as what it’s about ... well ... maybe someone holding onto a robe, maybe clinging to Christ's robe begging forgiveness or something. I don't know but I get this feeling when I look at it. Anyway this is really well done the hands are beautiful. Ya did good girl.
Peace, AL

I agree with Alfred that this conveys some feeling of maybe hope that the person on the right (it definitely seems like some sort of robe or dress) can help or save the person holding on? The white of the fabric seems to suggest purity, light, faith ... and the hands seem desperate to not let go, as if they will be taken up and out of their current cares and worries and into a better place if only they retain that hold. This seems to suggest a strong symbolism that the person holding on cannot handle things on his/her own and he/she needs external help, but at the same time, he/she cannot merely sit idly back and expect that help to come. Also, if, indeed, there is a person on the right, that individual would be placed at a much higher plane than would the person holding on, a possible metaphor for a holy and divine personage, perhaps.
Carey

"Think of Me; Love Me; Obey Me; Repeat My Name; Hold on to My daaman [hem of My garment]" —Meher Baba

Beloved

2010-04-23T18:45:00.003-04:00

Today I had tea at Adele Wolkin's with Adele, Lewis Stickford, Jonathan Burroughs, Judy Mangold, and Skeeter the Chihuahua. We looked through lots of of Adele's photos from all decades and found this lovely photo of Meher Baba, which Adele allowed me to borrow and scan. Marc Librescu retouched it and here it is filtered to look like selenium tone.

My Zazzle Stuff

2010-04-18T10:43:00.004-04:00

They Deserve to Be Named

2010-04-11T07:52:00.008-04:00

Last night at Meher Center we saw a film of the 1958 sahavas with Meher Baba at Myrtle Beach, on Baba’s last trip to America. Marshall Hay narrated the video, which had no audio, and whenever some familiar person was on the screen, such as one of the mandali or one of the old-time Baba-lovers was on the screen — Adi K. Irani, Kitty Davy, Margaret Craske, Beryl Williams, John Bass, Hedi Mertens, Lenny Willoughby, Donald Mahler — he would name that person for the audience. I had written in my essay “Looking at Meher Baba” that I did not like it when narrators distracted the audience’s attention from looking at Baba, as if the people around him were the “celebrities” we should take note of. Sitting next to me were two first-time visitors from Ontario, and I was concerned that the narration was causing them to look away from Baba to try to figure out who were these other people they had never heard of.

After the film, Phyllis Ott, who was sitting on my other side, seemed to read my thoughts when she told me that while watching the film she asked herself, “Why are these people being named?” I started to tell her my reaction to the naming of people in the film when she went on, answering her own question in a way I had never thought of. “It’s because they alone among so many were the few who had the inspiration or the wit or the impulse to make that journey, to travel to Myrtle Beach and take advantage of the opportunity to see Avatar Meher Baba,” she said. “That’s why they deserve to be named.”

Phyllis Ott Tells a Story of Francis Brabazon

2010-03-21T12:51:00.005-04:00

WHO SAID IT?

2010-03-12T10:26:00.007-05:00

Darwin Shaw, in his book As Only God Can Love: “This reminds me of Hafiz, who said, ‘To be with a Perfect Master for one moment’s time is equal to a hundred years of sincere prayer with all one’s heart and soul.’”

Mani S. Irani, in 82 Family Letters, attributes this quote to Kabir: "One moment with the Master is better than one hundred years of sincere piety."

Bal Natu writes in Glimpses of the God-Man, Meher Baba: "Jalaluddin Rumi, a matchless poet and Master, wrote, 'One moment in the presence of a Perfect Master is equivalent to a hundred years of sincere penance and prayer.'"

Meher Baba: “The Perfect Master Jalaluddin Rumi says that one moment passed in the company of a saint is infinitely better than a hundred years of sincere prayers and penance. Remember, he refers only to saints — the least you can say about a Perfect Master is that he is a maker of saints!” —The Awakener Magazine, vol. 3, no. 2, p. 18

Beginningless Beginning

2010-03-09T09:57:00.007-05:00

I found this in a notebook, written some years ago:

We say that God is our Creator, which implies an act of creation occurring in time. Suppose we remove that concept from the time process and say the same thing in a different way: that God is our Origin or Source, the essential Being at the center of our existence. He, or rather It, the Ultimate Reality, is our own Self, the one Self of every self.

If there is only one Self, then why do I see many selves around me, seemingly separate from my own self, as well as a whole world of separate things? It is because all of these things and selves are (apparently) continuously emanating out from the center — my center, your center.

Was there ever a time when this began to happen? Meher Baba calls it the "beginningless beginning"; and then there is an "endless end" . . . and then there is another beginningless beginning in a continuous series of cycles of Being and non-Being.

And yet . . . nothing happens, because it is all Maya, Illusion.

How extraordinary. And what am I supposed to do with this "information"? What good will it do me, as I go about my daily life, trying to meet responsibilities, trying to be happy and make others not too miserable, to know that the Everything is really Nothing?

Because of the love of Meher Baba, the idea of Nothing does not drag me down to nihilism and meaninglessness, but the Everything draws me onward toward Truth. There is nothing to be done about the existential predicament — nothing outward. But inwardly, I can practice remembrance of the Truth, in the form of Meher Baba, by making him my constant companion, and thus establish my center in the beginningless, endless Source.

***

That is what I wrote in my notebook. Is it true? I don't know. There are many creation myths, many possible ways of trying to imagine or explain the inexpressible (an effort that, we are told, will not help us reach the Supreme Goal of realization). This is just one way that I draw meaning from what I understand of Meher Baba's words.

Happy Purim, Jai Baba

2010-02-28T09:26:00.012-05:00

Beloved Baba's birthday celebrations in Israel coincided with Purim this year Michal sent me this photo of her at a costume party for Baba's birthday.

Happy Purim. Today is the Jewish holiday that celebrates the deliverance of the Jewish people from the threat of genocide, as told in the Book of Esther in the Hebrew Bible. It is a story of redemption, like the story of Exodus, the deliverance from slavery in Egypt. Symbolically or in terms of mystical spiritual practice, the Purim story is an occasion for overcoming the sin of "causeless hatred" (sinat chinam).

On Purim, the Book of Esther (she was a Jewish queen, married to the Persian king) is read in the synagogue (sung, actually, by the cantor) and whenever the villain, Haman, is mentioned, the kids (and maybe the adults too) rattle noisemakers. It’s a holiday when children dress up in costumes — sort of the Jewish Halloween — and plays (shpiels in Yiddish) are staged. On Purim the grownups by custom are supposed to get so drunk that they can’t tell the difference between the hero and the villain of the Purim story: Haman (the Persian official who plotted to kill the Jews) and Mordechai (Queen Esther’s cousin, who helped foil the plot). A goofy thing I have seen people do on Purim is, during the religious service, instead of singing the Hebrew liturgy to a traditional melody, humorously substituting a secular tune — for example, singing the Kaddish (a prayer that praises God’s name) to the tune of “Old Man River.” More seriously, giving gifts of food to friends and donations of food or money to the poor are also observances of the holiday.

Purim is thus the most secular of all the Jewish holidays. It’s a minor holiday, in that its observation is not religiously commanded by the Torah but is simply the celebration of a historical event. Interestingly, the name of God never appears in the Book of Esther, nor does it make mention of prophets, priests, or patriarchs. However, by implication it focuses on God’s presence, on the realization that His hand is evident in the playing out of events. There is a divine plan!

The Talmud says that when the Messiah comes, all the religious holy days will be abandoned, no longer observed. There is but one exception; only Purim will still be celebrated when the Messiah comes.

Rabbi Y. Hutner explains: “When the night of exile will be banished by the rising sun of the Messiah, when the presence of God the Redeemer will shine in all its strength and glory, this presence will be so glaring and obvious that we will no longer require the lights provided by our holidays to perceive the guiding hand of God in historical events. At that time the light of Godliness will be seven times more powerful than the light of the sun. And then the festivals with which the Jewish people felt the presence of God's guiding hand through great historical events will no longer be required….

“However, there is one exception. The special talent acquired by the Jewish people, enabling them to recognize the hand of God's guiding providence when God's hand was concealed, will remain their eternal possession even after the sun of the redemption will rise. At that time all of the holidays will pale, except for Purim, ‘whose remembrance will never be forgotten.’"

Meher Baba, the Avatar or Messiah of our age, would probably like the idea of abolishing the ritualistic religious holidays, except for one that is basically a party, a time for fun, jokes, and skits.

Meher Baba says:

“I have come to destroy in the world all rites and ceremonies that are superficial.”

“God and Truth are far above religions.”

“I am not come to establish any cult, society or organization; nor even to establish a new religion. The religion that I shall give teaches the Knowledge of the One behind the many. The book that I shall make people read is the book of the heart that holds the key to the mystery of life. I shall bring about a happy blending of the head and the heart. I shall revitalize all religions and cults, and bring them together like beads on one string.”

“Rituals and ceremonies cannot carry one very far towards the path, and if they are unintelligently followed they bind as much as any other unintelligent action. In fact, when they are deprived of all inner life they are in a sense more dangerous than other unintelligent action, because they are pursued in the belief that they help towards God-realization.”

“The urgent need of today to resuscitate religion is to dig it out of its narrow, dark vault and let the spirit of man shine out once again in its pristine glory.”

“Religion is a cage and the people who follow it are all birds locked up inside. It is meaningless to leave one's religion to adopt another. It is like going from one cage to another. The wire binding the wings of the bird must be cut.”

“The root of all sufferings, individual or social, is self-interest. Eliminate self-interest and you will solve all problems and difficulties. Cults, creeds, dogmas, religious rites and ceremonies or lectures and sermons can never bring radical relief from suffering. If suffering and chaos are to disappear and real happiness and peace are to come in their place, there has to be selfless love and universal brotherhood.”

Meher Baba - Avatar! (With apologies to James Cameron)

2010-02-09T18:32:00.004-05:00

Baba-lover Marc Librescu, a photographer and writer, designed this image.

Highlights of Raj Khilnani’s Talk

2010-01-27T14:43:00.006-05:00

Raj Khilnani from Mumbai visited Meher Center for the first time in January, and on Sunday the 10th we were treated to two talks by him. Here are a few highlights of the afternoon talk.

Raj is one of two sons and six daughters of Prem and Girja Khilnani. His mother is the author of a memoir called Journey to God: True Story of Smt. Girjadevi P. Khilnani, published 2006 in Mumbai. (“Smt.” is a title similar to “Mrs.”; and Girjadevi is the name by which Baba called Girja; devi means goddess.)

The family’s connection with Meher Baba begins with Raj’s father, Prem — in fact, Girja’s book bears the dedication "Thank you Prem for taking me for God’s Divine Darshan in Guruprasad, Poona.” Prem was brought up as “a kind of agricultural aristocrat” in Sindh (then India, now Pakistan), where he had 500 acres of agricultural land. He was trained as a barrister but did initially did not practice since he was wealthy and did not have to work.

In 1939 Prem went to stay with his uncle in Nawabshah, and since his uncle was in correspondence with Baba and had his photos and books, this is how Prem was first introduced to Meher Baba. Later, in the 1940s, Prem was a magistrate in another city. He was standing on the balcony of his house when he saw someone in a bicycle rickshaw inquiring about the whereabouts of a certain mast. It was Baidul, one of Baba’s Iranian mandali who used to do the initial legwork during Baba’s mast tours, to find suitable masts for Baba to work with spiritually. Hearing Baidul’s loud voice, Prem rushed down to offer his help, since he knew where that mast was to be found. Prem told Baidul that the mast liked tea, so along the way they picked up a pot of tea to bring with them. When they arrived and Baidul offered the tea, the mast said, “Why do you give me tea? I am not a magistrate.” Thus he mysteriously showed that he knew Prem’s profession without being told.

After the partition of India in 1947, the Hindus were driven out of Sindh, and the Khilnani family came to Pune as refugees. Now that the family’s circumstances had changed, Prem began to practice his legal profession and became a judge.

It happened that Prem’s younger brother had an ear ailment and required major surgery. While Prem was at the hospital (clinic of Dr. Apte), standing on the first floor, he saw “a very attractive person” coming down the steps followed by a few companions. Prem was drawn to rush after this wonderful person, but it was not his destiny at that time to meet him, only to see him. Upon inquiry he was told that the gentleman he had been drawn to was Meher Baba with his mandali. (On hearing this story I could not help recalling a dream I had many years ago that I was a little Indian boy, 4 or 5 years old, on a beach. I saw a wonderful person walking with long strides accompanied by a few men, and I tried to run after him, never knowing who he was, but had to be content with just watching him disappear into the distance, as I could not keep up with him.)

After Prem lost his property, he became disillusioned with the world. He began to read the teachings of Sri Aurobindo every morning and he wrote to Aurobindo’s ashram in Pondicherry. The Mother (Aurobindo’s spiritual companion, who was a teacher in her own right) replied, sending him a rose and inviting him to the ashram. He was planning the trip when he ran into Baidul again. Baidul recognized Prem and informed him that Baba was in Pune at Guruprasad. He would send for Prem when arrangements could be made for him to meet Baba. But owing to his spiritual restlessness Prem did not wait for Baidul’s call; he went to Gurprasad on his own and waited outside Baba’s bedroom. The attendant stopped him and told him to leave, but Prem persisted until Baba clapped for Eruch and told him to let Prem come in. Thus Prem Khilnani was introduced to Beloved Baba for the first time.

I was quite touched by the way Raj described his father’s first direct contact with Baba. It was summertime, which was quite hot even in Pune (where Baba used to come to escape the heat of Meherazad), so Baba was bare-chested, wearing just his underwear (langot). No doubt it was unusual for people to meet Baba in this half-naked state. Raj described how Prem could thus see “the glow of that glorious form.” With just these few words, combined with the tender expression on Raj’s face, I could feel how this family regarded the sacred human body of the God-Man with such loving reverence.

Perhaps this is something that Indians instinctively recognize. However, I remember once watching a film in which Baba walked with the aid of two walking sticks on the veranda at Guruprasad; here he was also bare from the waist up, and we could see his braided hair down his back as he turned away from the camera to pass through a doorway. I seem to remember you could tell that his hair was damp with perspiration from the heat. My friend Carol made some soft exclamation to me, indicating that she recognized how intimate it was to have this glimpse of Baba’s radiant body. This in turn reminds me that in his talk Raj compared seeing merely a photograph of Meher Baba with seeing Baba in person: it was like the difference between seeing a photo of the sun and viewing the sun itself (which in fact you cannot look at directly because of the intense radiance). Raj commented that those who love Baba without ever having met him are more blessed that those who have seen the “sun” in the sky (the Avatar in person).

Baba told Prem he was going to America and would call for him after he returned to India. Prem thereafter dropped the idea of going to Pondicherry, and also began to get to know the Pune center members, including Pratap and others in the bhajan group.

At one of Prem’s later meetings with Baba, Baba told him to bring his wife and two sons. His mother, Girja, was brought up in a religious family, and they had their own gurus to whom they were devoted, a saintly lineage in Sindh and later in Mumbai. Her father was a British-trained doctor in the army. In 1939 when Girja was twelve years old, she used to read scriptures (Guru Granth, the holy book of the Sikhs) and recite prayers, and one time she wrote a letter to God saying, “Dear God, If you are there in this world, I want to meet you! I want to see you in a physical form and hope you will answer my prayer.” She addressed the letter to “God in Heaven” and dropped it in the post box — never dreaming in what manner her request would later be granted.

As a mother, when her husband brought her to Baba she went hesitantly, worried that Baba might “hypnotize” her sons, Vinod and Raj. Baba embraced them and let them kiss him on the cheek. Girja felt shy about kissing Baba, and when she sat before him, she looked down. Baba told her three or four times to feel free to look at him, but still she looked down. So then he told her: You wrote a letter saying you want to meet me, so why are you so shy? This finally caused her to open up to Baba. She became very close to Mehera, Naja, and the other women mandali. She often cooked food to send to Baba and the mandali.

One time Prem wanted to buy a car, a major purchase in those days, when not many middle-class people had cars. Baba offered his own car to Prem. It was a car that Baba didn’t use anymore; he had sent it to Arnavaz’s brother, who maintained it. Prem bought it for ten thousand rupees. He used it to visit Guruprasad and to drive to and from Nasik, where he was posted in his government job as a railway magistrate. Needless to say, he was thrilled to use the very car Baba had ridden in.

As the family became closer and closer to Baba, Prem wanted to move to Ahmednagar and requested a posting there. Since Ahmadnagar was not considered a very attractive place, he easily got his wish. Now Baba asked Prem where he intended to live. Prem replied that he would hunt for a place. Baba turned to Adi K. Irani and inquired about Khushru Quarters, which was vacant at the time. (It was Adi’s family’s home in those days; today it is the Avatar Meher Baba Trust compound.) Adi was resistant, saying that the place was not in good enough condition, but Prem insisted he would do the necessary repairs. Baba fixed the rent at Rs. 50 and told Prem to deduct the cost of the repairs from the rent. Thus the family lived rent-free for the first year.

Now Raj began attending the Sacred Heart Convent school in Ahmendnagar, where he would hear many stories of Jesus. The missionaries of the local Salvation Army Mission of Australia were also very friendly to them, so Raj and his brother used to write “Jesus” on the walls of their home. Prem casually told Baba about this, and Baba said, “Jesus was, and here I am!”

When they went to meet Baba, he would kiss them; they could hear the sound of his kiss on their cheeks. Even at a young age they recognized the thrill of embracing and kissing God. Baba would ask Raj and Vinod, “Who am I?” “Who do you take me to be?” They would say, “You are God.” Baba said, “Are you just talking with your lips, or do you really feel it in your heart?” “Baba, I feel it in my heart.” Baba asked this question many times.

One morning before going to see Baba at Guruprasad, Raj was reading an article in the Reader’s Digest about the evolutiohn of life on earth. Impressed by how science explained this, he wondered, was there really a God? Now if Baba asked that question again, maybe he would not be able to say honestly, “You are God.” Sure enough, Baba did ask him the question that morning — and somehow “It just came out of my mouth: ‘Baba, You are God.’” Baba said, “Really? Are you saying it to please me, or do you really feel it in your heart?” It was a moment of enlightenment for Raj, who strangely felt all doubts vanish in an instant. Now he felt that God was “the perfect scientist,” who had created the world in a way that is compatible with science. The more scientific things Raj continues to learn, the more he appreciates God.

In the 1960s, although Baba was in seclusion, deeply involved with his inner Universal Work, the family had the good fortune to be invited to Guruprasad to see him. Hearing about it, an elderly relative, Girja’s sister’s mother-in-law, wanted to come along to see the “saint” (Meher Baba has made clear that he is not a saint, as explained in his message “The Highest of the High”); so Girja said okay, come with us, although Prem objected that Baba might be displeased. They all trooped into the large hall, and when Baba saw the uninvited lady he stopped them and demanded to know who she was and why she was there. Girja was shocked and tried to explain that this was a devoted person who wanted to meet Baba. The lady relative was also surprised and dismayed at being asked to leave, because she believed that saints would never prevent people from coming to pay respects to them, so she wondered what kind of saint could he be, to insult her and send her away? Girja accompanied the elderly woman home while Prem and their sons remained with Baba. Baba then remarked that “Girja really loves me. She might commit suicide because I sent her away.” So he told Prem to rush after her and call her back (without the other lady). Baba understood Girja’s upset feelings and forgave her the disobedience. But the family had come a little closer to understanding the importance of obedience to Beloved Baba’s wish.

Raj said Baba’s orders were relatively few and usually only given to intimate followers of Baba’s. In those days they didn’t realize the significance of the Master’s orders. One time Baba asked them when they were leaving and they said after lunch. Baba told them to leave by four p.m. Their driver wanted to have lunch with his relatives, and though they asked him to come back in time to leave by four, he didn’t return till five-thirty. They set out, but once they were outside of Pune their car broke down and the driver could not fix it. It started again, but stopped again after five km. This went on until they reached the halfway point of their journey, and it was almost midnight. This should have been only a three-hour trip! Someone suggested bringing the car to ‘Nagar by truck. By the time they got back to Khushru Quarters it was four a.m. They had to wake up someone at Sarosh’s garage to get the car down. When all this was accomplished, it was 5:30 in the morning. So it took twenty-four hours to get home, owing to their disobedience.

I do not take such stories to imply that people were “punished’ for not following Meher Baba’s orders; rather, Baba foresaw the difficulty and his orders were designed to help his lovers avoid accidents and distress. (There may have been other reasons for giving the order, unknown to us.) Apart from that, simply following any order of the Master, no matter how seemingly trivial, would be beneficial. In the words of Hafiz, “Whatever the Master does is of the highest benefit to all concerned.” Although we are all human and make mistakes, it is for us to remember that, as Girja says in her book, “obedience is the greatest way to love Him.”

At times there was much anxiety from failing to obey Baba, Raj told us; at other times nothing bad happened. For instance, when Girja was not well and was told by Baba to take B complex vitamins and an egg every day, she sometimes forgot to do so; but by Baba’s grace, she did not suffer much from this.

There were so many stories that Raj shared about how Baba enriched this family’s life, I wish I could have taken down all of them, but finally I had to stop scribbling like mad and just sit back and listen. So I’ll end here. You can view a video online of one of Raj’s talks given in California.

New Web Site: Meher Baba Manifesting

2010-01-20T13:26:00.008-05:00

I’m pleased to announce the launching of a new web site, Meher Baba Manifesting. For some time I have been wanting to bring together material relevant to Baba’s Silence breaking and Manifestation so that people can study what has been said by Baba and others about this still mysterious aspect of Baba’s Universal Work. Fortunately David Carter gave me permission to use his considerable research consisting of quotes he compiled under several categories, as well as an essay he wrote summarizing his views of the Silence breaking.
Now that my friend Cheryl Johnson, a professional web designer (photo at left), has volunteered to manage the technical aspects and design, we’ve been able to get it started. We are still adding to the site, but there’s enough on there now to make it publicly available. Please note that we are also inviting submissions of your own views or visions and intuitions on these topics (see the Welcome page). Do you agree with me that the time is ripe for increasing interest in the Avatar's Manifestation?

Phyllis Ott: Highlights of an Informal Talk at Meher Center (Original Kitchen), October 28, 2009:

2009-11-25T11:00:00.008-05:00

The way Phyllis Ott gives a talk is unique—a brilliant, creative one-woman show. You never know what to expect. Standing in the doorway to the porch of the Original Kitchen while her audience sat in the living room area, with a flourish Phyllis donned the blue scarf Mehera had bestowed on her in 1965—“my credentials,” she called them.

But that is not Phyllis’s only credential. In 1966, she and her family became the only Baba-lovers to be permitted by Baba to build their house on Meher Center property. Others had been offered the chance to do so, but as things turned out, only the Otts ended up with this distinction. To be chosen, as it were, to make your home on God’s five hundred little acres—what does that mean? It’s anyone’s guess, but it boggles the mind. Her contributions to the life of the Center are countless. She is remembered by many visitors over the years for hosting teas with guests from around the world, as well as leading meetings for discussion of God Speaks, Meher Baba’s master work, in which she has immersed herself (He had told her to read it several times). I feel her very presence here has some mystical impact, some je ne sais quoi that often goes unacknowledged, or maybe it’s that no one is able to identify or recognize or describe it.

Back to her talk: Phyllis tells us she once wondered, “Does Baba know me?” But now “That is accomplished. He might not pick me out of a crowd, but he created a name for me: Phyl”—which, when combined with the name of her husband, Lyn Ott, made “Phylyn.” Phyllis saw this as echoing the new vocabulary of the time, the 1960s, when the media theorist Marshall McLuhan spoke of "cool" media that require the viewer to “fill in” (Phylyn) the blanks. The wife-and-husband team Phylyn created paintings together when Lyn’s visual impairment had progressed to the point where he could no longer complete a painting without help. Or, as Phyllis puts it: “Chances are if you have a Lyn Ott painting, my fingers are in it.”

And then there are the seventeen magnificent Phylyn murals created in 1975 for the Meher Pilgrim Center in Meherabad—more credentials, should you require them. Phyllis of course also painted, and still paints, her own distinctive paintings of or inspired by Meher Baba.

Phyllis Ott went alone to see Meher Baba in India in 1964, while Lyn stayed home. Because Baba had postponed a planned darshan till December of 1965, Lyn felt it would be disobedient to go earlier. But Phyllis was following a clear inner call to “find and love the Self that lives within.” Everything was ready for her trip in a week—it was a cinch.

On the plane to India the man next to her was a Ph.D. from Harvard who told her he was going to Africa to study the inception of states. Following the decolonization of Africa, new independent states were emerging at that time—some had sad outcomes, a few were victorious. Phyllis (who also graduated from Harvard) thought to herself: I’m going to India to study the inception of a religion.

To express what she was feeling in those days, Phyllis passed around a black and white photo from an old Life magazine, showing the tunnel under the English Channel at the moment when the French diggers met the English diggers in the middle—she said it synchronized with her experience of consciously living through a spiritual dark night of the soul. It was like a dark tunnel, and when she went to India she was hoping she would see light at the end of it soon. The photo was dark, dramatic, and misty. In sharing it with us, she transmitted her artist’s way of communicating in imagery.

Although Phyllis had asked Lyn not to tell people she had gone to India, he did inform Darwin Shaw. And so Darwin arranged for Phyllis to be met at the airport when she reached Bombay on Sunday evening of December 20.

On arrival at Ahmednagar, Phyllis was told Baba wanted to see her at nine the next morning, the 21st. She was also told that she was going to meet Mehera. This didn’t excite her, she admits. Previously, Jeanne Shaw and her daughter Leatrice had shown Phyllis a little photo of a beautiful woman—Mehera, Baba’s most beloved disciple. But in those days, Phyllis says, “I thought of women as the ‘second sex’”—that phrase is the title of a famous classic of early feminism by the French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir—“and I didn’t think anything of it.”

In her meeting with Baba, He asked her, “Now that you’re here, what do you want to do?”

When you met Baba, Phyllis said, you wanted to stay with Him; you didn’t want to go back to what you were before. Phyllis told Baba: “I came to see you. My return flight leaves Wednesday, and I want to stay near you for a few days.”

Baba replied: “No one can stay here anymore,” meaning Meherazad, where Baba lived. “You can stay at Villoo’s.” (Visiting Baba-lovers were often graciously accommodated in the Ahmednagar home of Villoo and Sarosh Irani.)

There were three darshans for Phyllis that day. The first was in the company of about thirty others. Adi Jr., Baba’s brother, was there with his wife, Freny, and their daughter, Shireen (now Shireen Bonner), who was then seven or eight years old. Also there was Adi’s son, Dara, who was there to make sure Baba kept His promise to arrange his marriage. At the age of nineteen, Dara, like Lyn Ott, was going blind from retinitis pigmentosa (RP). Phyllis then was eager to know how one learned to cope with this progressive condition, characterized by tunnel vision and culminating in total loss of sight. (Phyllis added that her twenty-year-old grandson is currently learning to live with this genetic disease.)

Dr. Goher told Phyllis not to feel bad about Baba’s not letting her stay: “It’s not easy to stay in Meherazad,” she said. But Phyllis did feel hurt. When Robert Dreyfuss visited Baba in 1965, he was permitted to stay in Meherazad, but by then, Phyllis says, “I wasn’t jealous; I was happy for him. No hocus pocus, but I had noticed some changes in myself.”

Phyllis’s life had been concerned with the love of family and friends, and she suffered when she felt rejected by people. She wanted to meet Baba so she could learn to love others without fear of rejection. It may not have been a spiritual aspiration, she tells us, but that’s what she felt.

The second darshan was private — others were sent out of the room. She did not speak of it at this talk.

Then there was the third darshan. Baba said: Why didn’t you bring Lyn? Phyllis had urged Lyn to come with her, but he hadn’t wanted to break Baba’s order. Phyllis spoke to Baba of Lyn’s blindness and how it wasn’t practical for him to travel. (Although Phyllis wanted Lyn to be independent, he often bumped into walls, she said, not even putting his hand out to protectively feel his way.)

Baba asked: Could Lyn see my face? Phyllis told us how hard it was to live with someone (her husband) who could not see her face, with all that a face conveys and communicates—instead, “all he could do was hear my awful Boston/Harvard accent” (this brought laughter).

On the wall at Mandali Hall, there was a white sign that reminded Phyllis of signs one used to see in butcher shops telling you the price of lamb or liver; it said something like: Greater than love is obedience, and greater than obedience is surrender. Reading this sign was the first time Phyllis had heard about obedience and surrender; she had only heard about love. So to Baba’s question of why Lyn didn’t come, her answer was: “Lyn obeys.” Baba said, “And you, Phyllis? Do you obey?”

Phyllis didn’t know how to answer that. Baba was giving her eye-to-eye attention. “A really important person is interested in you, it was amazing. I felt like a drum that was struck, and out of me came a response that surprised me as much as anyone.”

“And you, Phyllis? Do you obey?”

“I do, but Baba doesn’t.” That’s what came out of her mouth. And it was the right answer! Baba gave her surrender, she says.

“Tell Lyn I want him to come to India.” How perfectly Baba gave that kindness—Lyn being too timid to come because the date had been changed.

“I made a mistake, I shouldn’t have come without him. He could not come by himself. I was hoping Baba would get him escorted by someone, but Baba asked, ‘Is there any reason you can’t come with him?’” Phyllis admits she instantly thought of the expense, but she did not voice the thought because she felt she ought not to speak to Baba of money. Instead she said, “I can do it.” Baba said, “I want you to accompany him. Tell him I will show him my face as it really is. This I give to very few.”

Baba was done talking to Phyllis, and she was now just listening as he spoke to two girls from Australia: “How is your family? How is your mother?” etc. [Baba customarily put visitors at ease with loving inquiries about their health and family.] Then he’s telling them he wants them to leave this afternoon and take a bus to Pune to meet his brother Jal, who will take them on a tour of places connected with the birth and life of Meher Baba. Then he turns and says, “Phyllis, how would you like to go with the girls?” Phyllis began, “But Baba, we already decided what I’m going to do…” but suddenly she felt a kind of click (Phyllis made the sound) as if He had turned on her voice saying, “Yes, Baba, I’ll go with the girls.” But she felt terrible about it, as if she might have seen Him again had she not been so weak.

After Baba saw Phyllis privately, she was brought to greet Mehera. Adi conveyed to Phyllis an order for her concerning Mehera. Phyllis describes seeing two women descend the stairs (at Meherazad). Phyllis was then thirty-seven or thirty-eight; Mehera was seventeen years older and Mani ten years older. They didn’t look at all strange—Mehera was dressed Western style [I assume this means skirt and blouse], Mani in her Punjabi suit; they had Western hairstyles. Phyllis was struck by Mehera’s beauty.

The mandali were people who made you feel like you were somebody. Mani said, “And here’s Phyllis, who writes such loving letters.” Phyllis laughs with wonder and tells us her last letter to them had recounted everything she ate for dinner when out with friends. (“And that’s not a bad thing to write in a letter,” Phyllis added.)

Mehera took Phyllis in her arms—this contrasted with Baba, who had seemed cool except for His affection with His little niece Shireen, and that had disappointed Phyllis, who dreamed of being kissed by the Prince who made you no longer a frog. But Mehera kissed her on the mouth! (Later, at home, Darwin and Jeanne Shaw refused to believe this, pronouncing it ridiculous—but it was true, Phyllis says.) Mehera’s skin was lovely, and Phyllis asked her what she used. Glycerine and rosewater, Mehera replied. “I have stolen the secret of beauty of the Queen of the Universe!” Phyllis thought, and she later went searching for this magical cosmetic in stores.

Phyllis saw how the women mandali lived in poverty, without indoor plumbing or electricity. Francis Brabazon also told her the mandali had no money. He gave her a signed copy of his book Stay with God [a book about which Baba said: "My love will touch the heart of all who read it, as no book has ever done. It will appeal to the highest intellects and to those with simple hearts."]. Francis told Phyllis the meaning of the title: it means it’s only a stay. “I’m here with a ticket back to Australia,” he said. Looking at Adele Wolkin in the audience, Phyllis added, “If He’s going to keep you, He sends you home.” She was referring to the fact that Adele, like a number of other disciples and close lovers of Baba who had lived with Him in India, were eventually instructed to return home.

“You are here as long as Baba permits,” Phyllis says. Now Phyllis has been living in her house on Meher Center for more than forty-three years. “I was really sincere when I told Baba I wanted to stay with Him. And I’m here for life. Lyn was too. When we were given the option to move here from Woodstock, New York, and build a home on the Center, at first I didn’t want to do it. Why would I want to live in the land of Jim Crow [the South]?” Woodstock, famous as an artists’ colony, was wonderful—the mountains, the music and theater, and “the respect that people had for free spirits” like herself. In Myrtle Beach there were times when Elizabeth Patterson told Phyllis she was dressed inappropriately, and even took Phyllis to her beautician. So why stay here in Myrtle Beach? No other reason but to stay near Baba.

Phyllis answered a few questions. Adele wanted to know about Phyllis’s memoir, entitled Love Bade Me Welcome. Phyllis explained that the title came from a poem called “Love” by George Herbert (1593-1633). In an extraordinary impromptu performance, Phyllis succinctly interpreted the poem for us through dramatic gesture and storytelling. She did not recite the poem verbatim; part of it she paraphrased. Let me give you the poem here (I confess that I probably would not have understood it without Phyllis’s interpretation). Then I’ll try to describe, to the best of my memory, how Phyllis brought it to life for us so vividly—framed in the doorway where she stood as if on stage—and made us see how it pertained to her own encounter with Love.

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

If I lack'd anything.

"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";

Love said, "You shall be he."

"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,

I cannot look on thee."

Love took my hand and smiling did reply,

"Who made the eyes but I?"

"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame

Go where it doth deserve."

"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"

"My dear, then I will serve."

"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."

So I did sit and eat.

Phyllis evoked the scene: Upstairs, Lord Jesus is at the Last Supper with His disciples. A person—“perhaps a woman”—climbs the steps and timidly opens the door. Then she shrinks back, “Oh, forgive me…I shouldn’t have…” But the Lord steps forward and welcomes her, asking, “What do you need? How may I help you?” “Oh no,” the woman cries, “I am not worthy!” That was Phyllis acting the part of the woman. Then she steps into the role of the Lord, who confidently declares, “Well, we’ll change that!” Still the woman expresses her shame, her unworthiness. And now Phyllis stretches her arms out, as if on a cross, and powerfully quotes directly from the poem the Lord’s words: And know you not who bore the blame?

The next line, from the woman, ends with a period in the excerpt I copied from the Internet; but Phyllis spoke it as a question, uttered by one who can hardly believe her great fortune: “My dear … then I will serve?” And with a flourish the Lord beckons her to His table, to “taste his meat.”

If you haven’t read Phyllis’s memoir, coauthored with the talented Barbara Scott, please do so. You will find there many details of the experiences just touched on here, plus her subsequent trip to India with Lyn, and much more.

Mind

2009-11-13T10:23:00.001-05:00

Buddhist scripture says:

Mind.

Mind does not exist.

Its expression is luminosity.

—Prajnaparamita (Transcendent Perfection of Wisdom)

Meher Baba says:

Mind.

Mind changes according to the sanskaras but it is not transformed.

Mind is of the false and it remains false.

Being false, it can be annihilated.

—quoted in Glimpses of the God-Man, Meher Baba by Bal Natu, vol. 2, p. 339 (reformatted to match verse above)

Baba Dreams

2009-10-10T20:29:00.005-04:00

Today at Meher Center we had a special day for the nearby community. One of the events was a gathering in the Barn for sharing stories, poems, songs, and so on. I decided to tell a few of my dreams of Meher Baba. The following is basically what I said in the Barn, with a little embellishment:

In 1986, I was living alone in the Boston area, having moved there from New York a few years before. I had a book, Lucid Dreaming by Stephen LaBerge, about the technique of becoming awake in one’s dreams, and I started trying to lucid-dream. (I did not know, at that time, that Tibetan Buddhists practice lucid dreaming, or dream yoga, as a way of learning to recognize not only that I am dreaming a night dream, but that my waking experience is also a dream, an illusion in which I can also wake up.)

I followed the instructions in the book, and soon I achieved the first stage, which is the false awakening. That’s when you dream that you’ve woken up. You get out of bed and try to start your day, then suddenly realize that actually you haven’t really woken up—you’re still dreaming.

At this point I began to become more interested in the contents of my dream than in lucid dreaming. I had to decide whether to continue with my efforts to lucid-dream or to work on remembering my dreams, writing them down, and contemplating them. I didn’t exactly pose this question to Baba, but the question appeared in my mind: Is this a good thing for me to be doing, as inner work? Should I pay more attention to my dreams?

In a weird synchronicity, one or two days later, I got a letter in the mail (yes, back then people used to send a letter by post). It was from Eric T. in New York, someone I had not been corresponding with and had not seen in a few years, so it was completely out of the blue. In the letter Eric told me he’d had a dream about me that he thought I’d like to hear. The dream, as I recall it, was this: Eric was walking with Baba down the street. He began to guide Baba in a certain direction, but Baba gestured impatiently, “I know where I’m going.” They continued in the direction Baba wanted until they came to a house. They knocked on the door . . . and I opened it!

I decided to take Eric’s dream as a “yes” answer to my question—a go-ahead to continue with writing down my dreams and paying attention to the content, rather than pursuing the lucid dreaming.

Right from the beginning, I tended to have very short, concise dreams, some of them almost like jokes with punch lines. In fact, the very first dream I recorded was worthy of Henny Youngman (or maybe Henny Youngman on acid): “Man gets off an airplane in Israel, carrying a pair of pants from the cleaner’s over his arm. But they won’t let him enter the country till he has the pants circumcised!”

I wrote down many dreams, short and long, over the years, and some of them of course were Baba dreams. Here are a few of the short Baba dreams that I read out at the Center today. Everyone loved the one about the apes. I’ve added a few more to the list, which begins with the Ridiculous and moves on to the Sublime:

If everyone were a Baba-lover, there might be too many people putting shellfish back in the water.

I yelled “Baba” at a dog to stop it, but that made it come to me.

It is the future, and, with great emotion, people are hugging the chair that Meher Baba once sat in. They also hug copies of God Speaks—instead of reading it!

I am going to a meeting of the local Meher Baba group. I make up a joke and plan to tell it there:

Q: What should be done to the enemies of Meher Baba?

A: They should be rounded up and hugged at dawn.

I find an old, worn brown wallet. Inside there are many old sepia photos. Each one has a man in it who almost resembles Baba. There’s enough of a lack of resemblance to make me doubt and wonder—yet why on earth would anyone have photos of someone who was NOT Baba?

A group of people are on an international bus. I am at the front and see the crazed driver heading straight for a brick wall. I start to scream “Baba,” assuming I will be the only one, but to my surprise behind me there are choruses of “Baba!” from the international crowd, showing that there were Baba-lovers on the bus and I hadn’t even realized it. The bus miraculously does not crash into the wall.

I enjoyed a kind of prophetic dream phrase as I was waking up: "A culture-defying world unitive." It seemed to be the tail end of a dream in which the question was asked of how Baba was going to solve the world's problems. And the answer: with a unifying force so compelling in its essential truth that people would instantly abandon their cultural biases and differences.

Seated before Baba, I peel an orange the size of a globe of the earth and carefully pull off all the little strings and bits of white pith, without damaging the surface of the fruit or losing any of the juice. I solemnly present it to Baba with two hands, and he takes it with two hands.

In my dream I had a vision or powerful realization that everything was just as Baba had planned it, all the way to his next advent. It was pictured symbolically as a very long dirt road through a green landscape in bright sunshine — going straight to its destination. There was a sense of, "What a shame — He worked so hard making it perfect — infinitely painstaking work for which He had to undergo the agony of human form — and here we are, praying for it to be different, complaining about it, worrying about it, wishing things were otherwise . . . so few to appreciate His gift.

I have been sent as a representative of the Great Apes to tell Meher Baba, on behalf of these mute creatures, how much the gorillas and other apes love him. Baba embraces me and I pass on the message as my head lies warmly against his chest. The next day I am called back to receive a gift: Baba brings out several photos of his favorite baby apes, smiling to encourage my appreciation of their cuteness. He beams proudly while looking at their portraits. [See marvelous artwork by Anne Giles below that seems to echo this dream.]

I dreamed this: Each one goes to Baba on His arm. He escorts you to Himself.

I actually did have some lucid dreams over the years. In one of them, I was at one of the annual Northeast Gatherings for Meher Baba, and I was carrying the sadra, a long white garment that Baba wore, which had been given to our group by Mehera. We had a special carrying case for it, and it was a bit heavy since the sadra was in a handmade wooden box. In the dream I was headed for a cabin up ahead, but suddenly I became lucid and I realized, “Hey! This is a dream, so I don’t have to carry this heavy sadra bag over to that cabin—I can just be there instantly!” And so I was.

Jai Baba.

Collage © Anne Elizabeth Giles

Shira sings to Baba

2009-09-29T17:55:00.010-04:00

Shira Shiror is a young Baba-lover from Tel Aviv; her name, Shira, means “song” in Hebrew. Recently Shira visited Meher Center and shared one of her songs with Jonathan Burroughs, who gave me the recording for my blog.

Shira tells how she came to compose this song when she was in India:

«It happened in Meherabad at the beginning of January 2008, a few days before I had to return to Israel. I was sitting alone inside the Samadhi. I was so happy that it was just me and Baba alone together. Suddenly I heard Baba’s voice inside me, telling me, “Go out from the Samadhi now!”

I didn’t understand and asked Baba, "Why now, when I have this rare opportunity to be alone with You in the Samadhi?"

Then Baba said, "I want you to write a song for Me and to sing this song one day before you leave Meherabad, during Arti time."

So I went out of the Samadhi and sat down not far from it … and after five minutes I had the words and music.»

The name of the song is “I Have Nothing Except You.” Listen to Shira sing the song here. Here is Shira’s translation of the Hebrew lyrics:

I see Your face all the time

shine inside of me like a big sun

now I am ready to hear what You want to tell me

suddenly I feel holiness

suddenly I feel weakness

and You are looking at me with a smile on Your face.

I have nothing except You …

שירה שיראור

Shanah Tovah, Happy Jewish New Year 5770

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Meher Baba's Message to Youth

2009-09-07T18:22:00.005-04:00

Since President Obama is going to give a message to youth on September 8, I thought I’d publish Meher Baba’s message to youth from Listen, Humanity, pp. 179-80.

“It is the privilege of youth to be full of energy and hope. Not being caught in any ruts, your dreams of the future have the advantage of being inspired by an unfettered imagination. In the glow of a newborn love or in the warmth of a newly caught enthusiasm, you are quick to respond to the call for action and sacrifice.

“Life would be poorer without these qualities that are predominantly present in youth. But if you are to derive the full benefit of the qualities with which you are abundantly endowed, you must also try to acquire some other qualities which are rare in youth.

“Hope should be fortified by a courage which can accept failure without upset. Enthusiasm should be harnessed by the wisdom that knows how to wait with patience for the fruit of action. Idealistic dreams about the future should be balanced by a sense of the realities of the present. And the glow of love should allow itself to be illumined by the full exercise of reason.

“It is easy for youth to be so absorbed in realizing the ideal that it becomes bitter against the present and the past. But it is as well to cultivate a spirit of idealizing the real, while being appreciative of the heritage of the past. The world as it is may not seem to conform to the pattern which youth adores, but you must never forget that it is always good enough to merit your most loving attention. In your desire to improve the world, do not, by becoming bitter, surrender your right to be happy.

“Youth loves freedom and therefore has a natural impulse to rebel against all authority. This is well and good, but you should make a real effort to keep free of the many illusions to which youth is particularly susceptible. True self-expression need not include irreverence for others. True criticism need not involve snobbishness or cynicism. True freedom need not manifest hostility or separateness.

“Freedom without responsibility is a doubtful boon. Freedom is worth having only where there is self-restraint and willingness to cooperate with others. Youth is always willing to act and take risks. It should be allowed to yield freely to this fearless and imperative urge of life within. But while engaged in action, youth must take every care that it is creative, and not destructive. Let your watchwords always be LOVE and SERVICE.”

Bill Le Page at Meher Center

2009-08-15T18:42:00.004-04:00

Bill Le Page at the Youth Sahavas; photo pilfered from Facebook.

Yesterday evening Bill Le Page gave an eloquent talk at Meher Center. That day, Friday, August 14, was Bill’s eighty-fifth birthday, and by chance it was also the day on which Lord Krishna’s birthday was celebrated this year. (Krishna’s a little more than five thousand years old!)

We learned that when Bill Le Page (at age thirty) went to India for the September 1954 Darshan, as one of a handful of Western men invited to attend, he had his first personal contact with Meher Baba (who was then sixty). At that time, Bill said, he was more aware of Baba as God than as man. Baba’s eyes were like two shafts piercing into him, and the sense was “Got you!”

He recalled watching rapt as Baba distributed prasad of Indian sweets to the immense crowds who came for His darshan in Wadia Park (Ahmednagar). The perfect curve of His back as He repeatedly bent forward to extend a handful of sweets to each person was like a powerful drawn bow. In the heat, Eruch would wipe Baba’s brow from time to time. The vitality and energy of Baba’s movements were amazing.

Bill became absorbed in the beauty of Baba’s constantly changing facial expression. Later, the three Australians—Bill, Francis Brabazon, and John Ballantyne—had an interview with Baba, and when Baba turned to gesture to Eruch, Bill was suddenly reminded that it was Eruch reciting Baba’s gestured words, not Baba’s own voice—so complete was the illusion that the Silent Master was speaking. His face was so alive, His glance constantly darting, the patterns of His expression ever changing.

Nudged by Francis, Bill asked Baba, “Will you come to Australia?” and He gestured, “Do you think I’m not already there?” That was the only question Bill ever asked Baba, because it was clear that He knew exactly what He was doing, and there was no need for Bill to query or to wonder. (Baba did visit Australia twice, in 1956 and 1958.)

Another glimpse of Baba’s perfection came when He was in the car conferring with Pendu, who was in charge of organizing the Final Declaration meeting that over 900 men would attend. As Pendu questioned Baba about some problem, Bill was watching Baba’s face and thinking: “The perfect CEO!” It was obvious He had everything all mapped out.

Bill loved watching Baba walk up the hill from Lower Meherabad, His incredible grace as He strode along with four or five of His mandali alongside Him. He was like a perfect dancer who forgets himself and becomes pure movement. With one fluid motion He would pick up a stone and toss it to the side.

Bill said: “My upbringing was such that I was completely shy—it wasn’t in our culture to be familiar even with my own father; there was very little personal physical contact, and I felt the same with Baba (although my father was very loving).” He watched Baba with the very elderly Will Backett. Baba asked Will how he was doing, and Will said, “Getting better, Baba.” After a few moments Baba asked with humor, “Does it really continue to get better? When does it end?”

When Baba gave messages and discourses, Bill became the serious student. Discourses were not to be taken lightly; Bill wanted to know everything there was to know about spirituality. He was writing down everything Baba said. When Baba paused for a moment, Bill looked up and watched Him as He inclined His head and glanced pensively to the right; all of a sudden a haunting sadness came over His eyes, a look that Bill found extremely moving. Bill thought to himself, “Baba, stop like that so I can gaze at You.” And at that moment, Baba said, “Let’s stop the discourse and you all can look at me for five minutes,” and He resumed that exact pose. Bill thought Baba was like one who was homeless, and all He sought was a home in each heart…

You can read about these and other stories in Bill’s own words in his book The Turning of the Key: Meher Baba in Australia. For another account of Meher Baba in Australia, see John Grant's book Practical Spirituality with Meher Baba. Grant's book will eventually be downloadable free at the Trust's online library.

“Baba’s L.P. Party” Comes to Myrtle Beach

2009-07-26T20:27:00.004-04:00

Mehernosh Mehta as Meher Baba in the play

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking my dog in Briarcliffe, near Meher Center, when I saw Bryan West zip by on his bike, sporting a new mustache. I called out, “You look like an Iranian!” and he yelled back, “That’s good!” At the time I had no idea Bryan would be appearing in the role of Eruch Jessawala in this past week’s performance of Baba’s L.P. Party, a play written by Mark Riney—“an interactive musical comedy in the round.” For the first time ever, the chairs in the Meeting Place at Meher Center were rearranged, on several levels surrounding the central stage, transforming that familiar venue into an intimate theatrical space where we the audience felt we were right in the midst of the action.

It is impossible for me to summarize the plot of this play, which is a joyful celebration of synchronicity that should make every baby-boomer Baba-lover exclaim, “Far out!” Suffice it to say that, with a little help from his friends, Mark succeeded in bringing together numerous realms of time and space, ranging from a pair of dudes hanging out in front of a present-day Myrtle Beach donut shop, to the “Three Incredible Weeks” in 1954 when nineteen Western men were invited to be with Baba in India, to a historic 1964 meeting at which Bob Dylan turned on the Beatles at the Hotel Delmonico in New York City (wow, the same place where Baba received people in his room in 1956), and Paul McCartney’s revelation of the Meaning of Life: “There are seven levels.” What can I say—you hadda be there.

This multimedia production combined painted set design, video, audio of Eruch in Mandali Hall, recorded and live music, and dance. The music included the old LPs played for Baba at the 1954 gathering, such as the exotic singing of Yma Sumac (while her record was played, she was memorably re-created by a vividly costumed and lip-synching Bobbi Bernstein). Humorous speculation about what kind of music Baba would consider the "seventh shadow" of God's voice gave the opportunity to present audio and video of various golden oldies, and to see an impressive B-52s impression performed live by extremely hip tiny children. And then there was the “Song of the Wind,” verses Darwin Shaw wrote, inspired by Baba’s beauty, during the Three Incredible Weeks; it was sung in two versions by Jonathan Burroughs and David Walsh.

Let the song of the wind ever remind you of My Love.

Let its soul-healing balm sigh through your being wherever you are;

And know that I have loved you as only God can love;

And be sure that I will love you thus throughout Eternity.

Know, beloved, that you are Mine forever.

That I have called you from the realm of illusion

To caress you with Love, with LOVE DIVINE.

There were many fine performances by the actors, including Bill Le Page playing himself and Charlie Eaton playing his own late grandfather, Frank Eaton (both of whom attended the 1954 men’s meeting). Otherwise I will only single out for mention the outstanding portrayal of Meher Baba by Mehernosh Mehta, who is, I believe, from Mumbai. I had met Mehernosh at the Center a few days before, and never would I have guessed how this unassuming man could transform himself into the animated likeness of Baba in his pink coat, smiling, gesturing, wielding an alphabet board, and distributing prasad to the audience as a finale to the play.

At times I felt that, like Baba himself, Mehernosh seemed to be the only alive person in the room. By this I do not mean that any of the other performances were lackluster. Far from it—everyone projected tremendous energy. But you could not help being magnetized by the portrayal of Baba. Only when Baba himself appeared on the movie screen was the illusion broken. Still, when the lights were down at certain points, I looked at Mehernosh’s silhouette in the dark and could tell he was concentrating on remaining in character. What a meditation this performance was for him, and for us.

Meher Baba in Iran

2009-07-15T18:50:00.005-04:00

Naosherwan Anzar, publisher of the Glow International, spoke informally this afternoon in the Original Kitchen at the Center. He told us about his Archival Preservation Project and all the amazing treasures he has collected over the years, including many documents, photographs, garments, and other items associated with Meher Baba (and even some hair of Hazrat Babajan). With a mandate directly from Baba, in 1966 and 1968, to tell others that He is the Avatar, Naosherwan is determined to share these resources and make the materials available for study as soon as possible. To that end he is raising money to move the extensive collection from his home in Princeton, NJ, to a suitable public center. Please see the Beloved Archives web site for details.

Then Naosherwan went on to describe his visit to Iran in the late 1970s with his mother, in quest of Meher Baba's ancestral history. First he described a little of the history of Iran, where original inhabitants were Zoroastrians, followers of the ancient religion of Zoroaster (aka Zarathustra). The Arab invasion of Persia and subsequent Islamization of the country resulted in persecution of Zoroastrians. Among other things, Zoroastrians were forbidden to wear spectacles or jewelry, forced to tie their turbans in a particular way, and compelled to build houses that could be peered into from the outside by strangers. They and other non-Muslims (including Jews and Armenian Christians) had to pay an exorbitant tax (the jizya). Naosherwan told us that an uncle of his wife, Maharoukh, had been an activist in having this burden lifted from the Zoroastrian community (in 1884, according to Wikipedia).

Various waves of immigration from Iran took place as Zoroastrians fled persecution and discrimination. The Parsis who settled in India some thousand years ago were so called because they came from Pars, the capital of the ancient Persian Empire. A later, smaller wave of immigrants from Iran were known as Iranis (and this included Meher Baba’s father, hence Baba’s birth name of Merwan Sheriar Irani).

So this was the background to Naosherwan’s trip to Iran with his mother. He told us a number of interesting stories. They visited Baba’s father Sheriar's hometown, Khooramshar (as it is spelled in Lord Meher), which is a small town outside Yazd--NOT the Khorramshahr that is a port city on the Gulf. They saw the ruined, abandoned home of Baba’s grandfather, Mundegar. Naosherwan said someone told them the story of how Sheriar as a youth had one day simply walked away from his home; the man pointed toward the wilderness, saying it was the direction in which Sheriar had vanished. No one had any idea where he went. We, of course, know that Sheriar, with the name of God (Yezdan) on his lips, had embarked on a spiritual quest and eventually reached Bombay and then Poona, where his son Merwan was to be born in 1894. (The story of Sheriar Mundegar Irani is told in volume 1 of Lord Meher.)

Naosherwan told of meeting an older woman with beautiful thick black hair. Her name was Tehmina Farvarun. She said, "You see my hair?" Naosherwan said yes, he'd noticed that it was very beautiful. Then she told that she was twelve years old when Baba came to Iran in 1929. All her hair had fallen out because of boils on her scalp, and her parents were distraught, because how would she ever be able to get married? So when they heard that a saintly person (Baba) was coming, they sought his help. Baba asked them to bring a bowl of water. He touched the water and instructed them to apply it to her head three times every day. They did this, and her hair grew in luxuriantly, and remained beautiful even into her maturity. The mandali were later stunned by this tale, according to Naosherwan, as they said they had never heard of Baba performing a miracle like this. The woman said that there had been a subsequent miracle when later her husband had meningitis and Baba came to her in a dream and assured her that when she woke up, he would be all right. And when she woke up, her husband was no longer ill.

That’s as much detail as I am able to report of Naosherwan’s fascinating talk. Next Saturday he is giving a talk in the evening, which I look forward to.

Veiled by Her Simplicity

2009-07-11T11:09:00.002-04:00

Ken Coleman wrote this beautiful tribute to a true disciple of Meher Baba:

Perin Irani joined her Beloved Baba Thursday morning at the age of 91. Her various bodily systems had been slowly weakening for many months, and she gently passed away during her sleep around 1:45 AM, Thursday, July 9th, at Baba House in Pune.

I have always found it surprising over the years how little attention Perin Irani attracted. She was hand-picked by Baba to marry his brother Beheram, and had a lifetime of incredible experiences with Baba that go back to the early years. Every facet of her life was directly orchestrated by Baba’s hand. Despite all of this, I often noticed, after speaking with Baba-lovers who had visited Baba House in Pune, that many of them didn't really remember the elderly woman sitting in the main room who possibly gave them Baba's blessing.

For me, one of the highlights of visiting Pune was to see Perin and receive Baba's blessing through her. Although the thought of someone giving Baba's blessing sounds impossible or even arrogant coming from virtually anyone else, receiving it from Perin was something different, something completely pure. There was no Perin when she gave Baba's blessing. She was an empty vessel carrying Baba's love. There were times when I would close my eyes when Perin touched my forehead and I saw Baba in my inner sight touching me.

Those who spent time around Perin knew that half the time she was with them, and half the time she was with Baba in some other world. She had no material interests. She didn't care if she ate gourmet food, had nice clothing or jewelry, or to partake in any worldly activity. She didn't need adoration or attention. She was so simple because her needs were simple. It seems to me that this is why, despite being such a great soul and so close to Baba, that she was not a celebrity in the Baba community. It was her simplicity that veiled her. It is the kind of simplicity that comes from having no personal needs or requirements other than being with Baba.

Over the years she suffered from a number of illnesses but I never felt there was self concern in her suffering. The last time I saw her was in January of this year and although suffering a great deal, her only concern was how I was doing. Her happiness in my happiness was so apparent. Although physically weak, she was emotionally energized about going to Meherabad for Amartithi. This was the one outside “activity” she always looked forward to. No matter how poor her health was, Perin always managed to make the pilgrimage to Meherabad on Amartithi every year. Even at the age of 91, being physically weak and frail, and being the eldest of Baba’s family members, Perin waited for hours with the other pilgrims to take her darshan. As her sons Rustom and Sohrab worked their way in the queue, she sat waiting outside the Samadhi for them to reach the threshold of the Samadhi so she could take her turn. There was no sense of entitlement on her part.

Perin was an inspiration to me and all who knew her and an extraordinary example of true discipleship to her Beloved Baba.

Ken Coleman

Washington, DC

Darwin Shaw and Esfandiar Vesali

2009-06-25T07:14:00.006-04:00

Zo Newell recently posted on Facebook this photo of Darwin and Esfandiar embracing at Dilruba on Meher Center, inspiring me to post this 2002 article about a meeting between these two great lions of Meher Baba's love. (Darwin passed away in 2005, Esfandiar in 2006.)

A Visit to Youpon Dunes

On Sunday, June 2, 2002, Esfandiar Vesali and Darwin Shaw, accompanied by a small group of Baba-lovers, visited Youpon Dunes, Elizabeth Patterson’s private residence south of Meher Center in Myrtle Beach, where Meher Baba had stayed for a month (beginning June 7, 1952) to recuperate from his automobile accident. Jonathan, my husband, was videotaping the visit, so I got to tag along and be one of the “flies on the wall.”

As we departed from Dilruba—the house that Kitty and Elizabeth once shared, which is now used for office work, for teas and other gatherings, and as a cabin for special guests (as it is this week for Esfandiar’s party)—it was very touching to observe Darwin and Esfandiar greeting each other with an embrace, two saintly men, somewhat fragile (Darwin is in his nineties, Esfandiar in his eighties) but both entirely blissful and radiant with Baba’s love.

Youpon Dunes, with its nicely furnished suites overlooking the ocean, today is a $5,000-a-week rental for tourists, and we had gotten permission for the visit, which took place amid the activities of the cleaning staff (among whom, someone told me, were a couple of relatives of Frank Eaton, the Center’s first caretaker). When we arrived, it was discovered that there was no longer an elevator, so Darwin and Esfandiar (who walks with difficulty using two canes) were helped up the stairs to sit for a bit in Baba’s room. Across the hall was the room where Mani and Mehera had stayed. (The men mandali had stayed in another house owned by the Pattersons, called Whileaway.)

Baba’s room was bright and cheerful, and Darwin sat and reminisced while Farshid translated his comments for Esfandiar. Darwin commented that the Baba vibes in the room were strong. He himself had not been in the house when Baba stayed there, but he had lived in it previously during the time when preparations were being made for Baba’s first visit to the Center. Those days were like a continuous meditation on Baba, he said, as they lived in anticipation of his coming.

Baba’s 1952 visit to the Center was originally supposed to be for a full year, but he ended up leaving for Ojai, California, after only two weeks. Someone asked Darwin if that wasn’t a great shock, after all the preparations they’d made for a year’s stay. He replied that they had become more resilient by then and went with the flow—whatever way Baba wanted to play it was all right with them: “There’s no vote in it!” Darwin added that he could never get over the fact that Baba even visited the West after the New Life and Great Seclusion. “I guess we needed it,” he concluded.

Baba had wanted Elizabeth to make sure she had her insurance papers before they began the drive, so they stopped at Youpon Dunes and he toured the rooms with great interest, perhaps because he knew to what use they would be put. Darwin described him as calm and poised, knowing full well what was ahead of him.

Darwin recalled the terrible blow to Mehera’s head in the accident, a wound that somehow grew back together. Farshid observed that the fact that Mani was uninjured must have been because Baba wanted her to be strong, to take care of Mehera.

It was a short and simple visit but in its own way momentous. A couple of times I stopped to try to let it sink in that the God-Man had actually stayed here. How incredible. There was something very special about this little pilgrimage, the mood both light-hearted and serious, with chanting of “Avatar Meher Baba ki Jai” upon arriving and leaving.

Meher Baba in Iran

2009-06-23T06:06:00.004-04:00

Peter Booth recently sent the following e-mail:

"In 1931 Meher Baba went to Mashhad, Iran, where the eighth Imam of Shia Islam, Imam Reza (765-818), is buried. Meher Baba has said that Imam Reza was a Perfect Master. His shrine is a place of great pilgrimage for Shia Muslims (about 99% of Iran is Shia). Every Iranian Muslim must go on pilgrimage to his shrine at least once in their life.

"As seen in the youtube video the shrine surrounding the Imam's crypt is massive. Non-Muslims are not allowed inside the compound around the Imam's crypt [Meher Baba was of Iranian Zoroastrian descent], and no one, save the caretakers and the high priests (ayatollahs) of Shia Islam, are allowed inside the crypt.

"When Baba came to Mashshad in 1931, he sent one of the mandali to the head caretaker of the shrine with the instruction to tell the caretaker, 'My elder brother wants to sit at night inside the crypt of Imam Reza; please give me the keys.' Of course the caretaker said nothing doing. Baba sent the same mandali member back the next day with the same request, and this time the caretaker gave him the keys, saying, 'Last night Imam Reza himself came into my dream and told me to give you the keys.'

"Baba sat for two nights in complete seclusion inside the crypt seen in this video. Twelve years later he issued this statement:

“'The seed of the tree of My Universal Manifestation is planted in Mashhad, Iran, from where it will spread until it covers the entire earth.'

"It may well be that Baba placed some of his Treasure inside the Imam's crypt and that for the past seventy-eight years, unknowingly, the people of Iran have been taking Baba's Darshan there and getting directly connected to him. And now maybe Baba has decided to begin the awakening in Iran leading to the Manifestation that he promised."

Book Review: Growing Up with God

2009-05-18T15:37:00.006-04:00

Growing Up with God by Sheela Kalchuri Fenster, with David Fenster.

Ahmednagar: Meher Nazar Publications, 2009.

Over 800 pages, illustrated with photographs.

Reviewed by Kendra Crossen

Available from Sheriar (East Coast), Love Street (So. Calif.), and Searchlight (No. Calif.)

In this lively memoir, Bhau Kalchuri’s daughter, Sheela, tells her story with the help of her husband, David Fenster, who edited transcripts of her recollections given over many years. This has been a labor of love for both of them, and we must applaud the Fensters for sharing so many inspiring and intriguing glimpses of Meher Baba as well as the men and women who surrounded him. Accompanying the text are 146 photos (half of them in color), most of which are being published for the first time.

Born in 1952, Sheela first met Meher Baba when she was less than a year old, and she lived in close proximity to him from the age of five until Baba dropped his body in 1969, when she was seventeen. She was aware from her earliest years of the sacrifice her family had made in order for her father to serve Baba as one of his close mandali. When she was older, Sheela told Baba, “A rose surrounded by thorns is like God’s beauty – we have to undergo suffering to reach Him.” Baba replied: “True, but when you are near me, I pluck off the thorns, so you don’t get hurt.” Sheela has had her share of suffering. As a youngster she suffered a terrible, painful accident, with severe burns on her back and arms from boiling milk. She almost died of typhoid and from a serious mastoid infection; Baba told her he had saved her from death several times.

Sheela’s parents, Bhau and Rama, both came from wealthy Hindu families and lived in comfort in Nagpur prior to setting aside their lives of privilege for the inestimable blessing of being with Baba. Bhau initially had no interest in spirituality and was pursuing three simultaneous graduate degrees; but a couple of powerful dreams, an unexpected experience at the tomb of the Perfect Master Tajuddin Baba, and a single meeting with Meher Baba transformed him. With the agreement of his pregnant 21-year-old wife, Rama, Bhau left his young family right after his graduation in 1953 to join Meher Baba. Sheela was not yet two years old; her brother, Mehernath, was born a few months later.

Rama then raised her children alone, although with the loving guidance and support of the Avatar of the Age. Bhau was ordered to give up his attachment to his family, although Baba also required him to write regularly to Rama (a number of these letters, containing news, advice, and occasional admonishments, are included in the book). Baba praised Rama for not complaining about being separated from her husband. (In addition, she accepted living in reduced circumstances compared with her upbringing as the daughter of a raja.) Baba has to remind Bhau of the extraordinary nature of his wife’s sacrifice: “You have no idea about her. No woman in the world would live like her, all alone there with two small children. She is really good.”

After a few years Baba called Rama from her parents’ home to come with the children and live near him. They arrived at Meherabad around April 1957 and moved into a bungalow near Arangaon village. Sheela describes her frequent visits to Meherazad, where she witnessed the qualities and quirks of the mandali, as well as precious times with Baba at Guruprasad in Pune. In 1963 the family moved to Khushru Quarters in Ahmednagar, the site of the present Trust Compound, which in those days was a private residence for Adi K. Irani’s family as well as the location of the Ahmednagar Baba center.

Sheela recalls that Baba never referred to her and her brother as Bhau’s children, but always called them the mandali’s children. “Don’t ever say they are Bhau’s children,” Baba declared. “They do not belong to him. They are my family.” At other times, Baba would tell her, “Who is Mani? My sister, you think? I don’t have any sister; I don’t have any brothers. I don’t have a mother or father. … God doesn’t have any relatives. God has only lovers.” A recurring undercurrent in the book is a kind of tension between attachment and detachment in relation to family. Sheela reports that she has always felt that Baba was her true parent. Yet her sense of family is strong as well. Although she did not have much contact with her father while growing up, since he was always busy serving Meher Baba, she loved him dearly.

If anyone ever wondered whether God really cares about the thoughts and feelings of one little pigtailed girl, Sheela is here to lay that doubt to rest. A remarkably bright child—outgoing, talkative, and bold—“Baby” (as Baba and her family called Sheela) would ask Baba outrageous questions, and get answers to them: How can we tell if someone is from another planet? Why doesn’t Baba either make everyone in the world good or kill off the bad people? Why did God have to create ugly creatures? Would Baba please give her some powers so she can fix things that are wrong with the world? Why can’t he make her win the lottery? (Baba’s reply: “Never do that. So many people buy tickets and all their sanskaras go into that. The person who wins thinks he has won lakhs of rupees, but in reality he gets lakhs of sanskaras.”)

If her imperious manner as a child drew complaints from the mandali, Baba defended her, saying that her sanskaras were those of a wealthy, sophisticated person—a princess. “Baby was supposed to be born in a royal family,” Baba explained, “but in order to be near me, I’ve given her birth in this family.” He also said she was supposed to have been born a man—and Bhau was supposed to have been a woman! Baba admitted he had made a mistake in assigning their genders.

Baby’s best childhood friend was Dr. William Donkin. William, as she called him, taught her the English alphabet, fixed her hair in a cute way, impressed her with his artistic talent, and explained to her how to love Baba: “Never demand anything from Baba. Accept what he tells you and follow his orders accordingly. If he wants you to live like this [on little money], accept it. Never ask Baba for anything.” Sheela took such lessons to heart and had an instinct for loving the Beloved: “Because Baba would sometimes pat my head or remark that my brain was sharp and tap me on the head, I never wore hairpins or clips in my hair when I went to Meherazad. Baba might get hurt when I embraced him or when he put his hand on my head. So I braided my hair into two braids to keep it in place. Mehera asked me once in front of Baba why my hairstyle looked old-fashioned. I explained why I had not used any clips, and she was pleased.”

Sheela was allowed to help Bhau with the Hindi correspondence and could not resist adding her own advice directed at any writers whose letters to Baba had annoyed her—but Baba always found out and made her cross out her contribution to the reply. Mehera let Sheela file Baba’s fingernails and comb his hair. She was fortunate to spend hours alone with Baba at Guruprasad, sometimes massaging him. And she received various orders from Baba, including one in which she had to shout insults at the mandali. Baba gives her tips for how to spend Silence Day, deals with assorted encounters with ghosts, and assigns her a special short daily prayer meant for her alone.

We are treated to glimpses of many of those who were closest to Baba—in addition to Mehera, Mani, and other women mandali, she writes of Eruch, Dr. Donkin, Padri, Pendu, Vishnu, Chhagan Master, Feram Workingboxwala, Dr. Deshmukh, Nana Kher, Mohammed the Mast, and especially Bhauji himself. The weaknesses of some of the mandali do not escape young Sheela’s observant and discriminating nature. Padri never laughed, and Mansari gave terrible fashion advice. We see the mandali fighting over sweets—and even worse behavior. But Sheela’s insights into the love between Baba and his closest disciple, Mehera, are surely worth the price of admission. The book concludes with a powerful account of Meher Baba’s death and entombment.

I can only hint at the amazing range of details revealed by Sheela. I bet you didn’t know that Baba read palms and facial features, for example; he even interpreted the meaning of a mole on Sheela’s foot! Some of the details are deeply significant, while others are entertaining or amusing: for example, when at Guruprasad, Aloba slept with Pegu the Siamese cat, who he believed would protect him from ghosts. One of my favorites among the touching anecdotes: When Baba was driven to the Arangaon tuberculosis sanatorium to see the patients, he also visited a room where white rabbits were used for tuberculosis testing, and “Baba fed a few pieces of grass to each of the bunnies through their cages.”

Growing Up with God would make an excellent candidate for reading aloud and discussion in a group. There are plenty of surprises in store. And I am sure Sheela will find herself more in demand as a speaker at Baba events after this publication.

See excerpt from Growing Up with God in the post below.

Why did God create ugly things?

2009-05-18T06:56:00.006-04:00

As children, both Shireen Irani Bonner (Meher Baba’s niece) and Sheela Kalchuri Fenster (Bhau’s daughter) were bright little girls who happened to ask Baba (on different occasions) the same question: Why did God create ugly things like snakes and scorpions? And each girl got a slightly different answer, as shown in these excerpts.

“Both Good and Bad Are Mine”
From The Beloved, edited by Naosherwan Anzar, pp. 95-96

In December [1964] Baba's youngest brother, Adi S. Irani, who lives in England, visited him with his family. It is on record that on this occasion it was astonishing to witness the tremendous awareness of seven-year-old Shireen, Baba's niece.…Shireen asked several intelligent questions which intrigued all those around her.

…"You are beautiful and so merciful, then why did you create snakes and scorpions?"

"You, Shireen are so pretty and sweet, yet when you sit on the potty you bring out what is dirty and stinking. Why do you do it? Because it is necessary — and moreover it keeps you well and pretty. And so are all things in God's creation necessary. Both good and bad are mine."

“To Me, Everyone Is the Same; to You, They Look Ugly.”
From Growing Up with God by Sheela Kalchuri Fenster with David Fenster,
pp. 96-97

About insects and scorpions, I once asked Baba, “Why did you have to make all these troublesome creatures? Why not everything beautiful? Why did you create so many ugly things?”

Baba said, “I didn’t make them, they created themselves. Their impressions from past lives make them look ugly. For example, people tell lies and collect bad sanskaras. When they create bad sanskaras, they look ugly and suffer in their next birth. They make themselves that way through their sanskaras.”

“But some ugly people have good hearts.”

“When their body is ugly, they realize their past mistakes, and they become better. They try to be good and, in that way, earn good sanskaras. To me, everyone is the same; to you, they look ugly.”

“Some good-looking people are bad.”

“Even though they may look beautiful, if their sanskaras are bad, you will feel like avoiding them. There will be something about them that you don’t like. Something in their eyes or in the way they look — like a snake. You won’t feel like being near them, even though they may be physically attractive; whereas you won’t mind being near an ugly person, if that person is good.”

“Why don’t you take away anger and other weaknesses, so only good sanskaras are there?”

“Good and bad have to balance. When they balance, you get mukti [liberation].”

“Why don’t you wipe away all bad sanskaras from everyone?”

“That will be Ram rajya [the time of Ram’s rule; a golden age].”

“In Ram’s time also there were bad people, like Ravana.”

“But I burned him. Ravana was not some ten-headed entity. Depicting him in that way is representative of bad sanskaras. After he was killed, people spoke the truth, never deceived others. Now, it is the Kali Yug. That’s why you see bad outweighing good everywhere.”

“You should bring about that Ram-raj quickly,” I said.

“One day it will happen.”

“Will I still be alive?”

“Maybe not.”

Sheela's book has just been published and is available at the Sheriar and Love Street bookstores. See Christina Arasmo's review here.

“Ten Incredible Days”: Thoughts on the 1969 Darshan

2009-05-15T20:09:00.003-04:00

The weekend of April 24-26, 2009, at Meher Center we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1969 Darshan, which was held at Guru Prasad (“Gift of the Guru”), the name of a maharani’s palace in in Pune, India, between April and June of that year. It is often called the Great Darshan: a great and unique event because it took place after Meher Baba dropped his body on January 31, 1969. The Darshan had been fully planned by Baba and was announced in October 1968 via the Family Letters written by Baba’s sister and disciple Mani. This Darshan was to be for his lovers and not the general public. Baba hinted that it would be unprecedented, and that despite his failing health he would definitely give his love to his lovers.

In 1968 I first “heard” the name of Meher Baba while in Jerusalem when a friend, Irene Schatzberg (later Meyer), wrote to me from back home in New York. In the few months since I’d been gone, she had become a Baba-lover (his term for his followers). When I returned to New York, I attended a Monday night meeting, bought the Discourses, and became an instant Baba-lover too. At that time, Baba was in seclusion, doing his universal work, so we were not supposed to even write to him, let alone think of seeing him. Then, in October of 1968, Baba announced the Darshan, and I was ready to sign up. I traveled in June 1969 with the New York flight arranged by the Society for Avatar Meher Baba, and with my friend Alice Klein was housed at the Poona Club with Filis Frederick and her group from Los Angeles. I had just turned twenty-three, and just separated from my husband of three years shortly before the Darshan.

During the Darshan I knew I was incredibly blessed to be there, and I also sensed that my consciousness was not fully present because a large part of my psyche was tied up in internal emotional issues, which through Baba I had learned to associate with the bindings of sanskaras—consciousness burdened by mental impressions. I was helpless to do anything about the feeling of being bound and just tried to be as aware and present as I could during the “ten incredible days” planned by Baba (four of which were actually spent in the mandali hall at Guru Prasad, just as we would have done had Baba been physically present).

I remember arriving at the Bombay Airport to the amazing sight of the local Indian Baba-lovers who had risen so early in the morning to greet the Westerners. I recall having a monstrous headache after the train ride from Bombay to Poona, and Dr. Aloo came over and told me that Baba said Saint Francis used to have headaches that made him beat his head against the wall; she clearly believed she was offering me a useful remedy! Later, Dr. William Donkin, who seemed sad and distracted in Baba’s physical absence, gave me a headache tablet. When we went to Meherabad, I vividly remember the moments inside the Tomb—we filed in and stood all around the crypt, even at the head of it (something one cannot do today unless on the cleaning team). I also recall the day the women met with the women mandali at Guruprasad, and how I was too shy to step forward and greet Mehera and Mani (I didn’t meet them till I returned in 1975 for a five-week stay). Other images that stand out in memory are a beaming Dr. Deshmukh in the crowd of people in front of Guruprasad, Sarosh introducing us to Mohammed Mast, taking a photo of Mani as she jokingly filmed someone who was filming her, and Adi K. Irani coming to talk at the Poona Club. Fortunately Filis Frederick wrote a detailed account of our trip in the Awakener, which helps me remember the blur of days.

Many years after the Darshan, I learned something startling that struck me as very significant. Someone told me that in the fall of 1968, when the Darshan was being planned, the list of Baba-lovers from the West who had signed up to attend the Darshan was read aloud to Baba. I later confirmed this with Eruch.

When I first came to Baba, the significance of hearing his name was impressed upon me. It was a surprise to realize that not only had I heard Baba’s name in 1968, but he had heard mine … he heard all the names. This struck me as extraordinary.

Recently at the Center a video of Arnavaz from the early 1970s was shown, and in it she recounted a movie she had seen with Baba, Hitchock’s 1956 film The Wrong Man, which was based on the true story true story of an innocent man unjustly convicted of armed robbery. The man to whom this happened was still alive at that time. When the ladies talked to Baba about this man, Baba remarked that whenever someone unjustly suffers for something they did not do, they receive a great spiritual push. And he added that this man especially received a push, because since the Avatar’s attention was drawn to the man by this conversation, he had focused on the man and this automatically gave him a spiritual push. This story caused me to remember that fact of Baba hearing our names read aloud. For a fraction of a second his attention was on me. Of course, I always assumed that the very reason I even heard about Baba and gone to the Darshan was that he had somehow seen fit to include me. But here was a piece of solid evidence that he knew of my existence. Although I didn’t know I needed this piece of evidence, it has really meant a great deal to me.

Baba taught us in so many ways—through example, explanation, inner experience, the words of his favorite Persian poets—what the role of a lover of God is, what it means to love God or the spiritual Master who is the living embodiment of God-consciousness, and what are the experiences of a lover of God—the longing, the burning within, the impatience with all talk that is not of God, the fact that ‘the more you love Him, the more you feel you are loving Him less.” One of the powerful emotions of the lover is expressed in the line “Please don’t be indifferent to me!” To have the Master shoot you a glance or show he is thinking of you is the greatest joy. To have him look away when you finally reach his feet after standing on the long darshan line is sheer torture. These are a few of the many examples that have been part of the education of our hearts through the stories of other lovers who met Baba. So to know that Meher Baba heard my name when he was in his physical form is an important acknowledgment.

I wish I could say that I had some powerful mystical experience of Meher Baba’s presence at the 1969 Darshan. I have had that experience, but I didn’t have it particularly on this occasion. I’m just really glad I accepted the invitation and showed up. It’s possibly the most meaningful thing I’ve ever done.

Elvis Sighted on Meher Center!

2009-04-26T12:02:00.005-04:00

It’s true! The Dilruba office at the Center received this e-mail message from a visitor to Myrtle Beach:

I am Robert; my wife is Dianne. We were staying at Land’s End condos next door to Meher Retreat. We got to the condo on 4/13/09. On 4/14/09 our bird, Elvis, a two and one half year old Cockatiel who goes with us everywhere, accidentally got out of his cage and flew away into the direction of the Retreat. I jumped the fence at the condos and went after him into the woods. I would call to him and he would call back, but he was high in the trees and very frightened. I couldn't get him (4 pm); we kept calling to him from the balcony of the condo and he would call back but he finally stopped calling back around dusk. We left his cage out there overnight, to no avail.

The next morning my wife went walking (7 am) and found the trail from the beach into the retreat. She walked deep into the retreat but didn't hear a peep out of Elvis; however, she did wake up a doe, who walked away, then she said that she briefly saw a large cat about the size of a small German shepherd; the cat appeared to be blond in color and was also walking away. When she got back to the condo she told me about her walk and wanted me to go back with her, which I did around noon.

We walked for about an hour and met a lady and then a couple. All three people were very friendly, so I gave them my business card and asked them to keep their eyes out for our baby. He had been out in 55 degree weather overnight with misting rain. These are conditions that he is just not supposed to survive, so I kinda gave up. Dianne, however, said that she was sure that he was alive. She was sitting out on the balcony crying her eyes out and I was just staying back out of the way, reading.

All of a sudden she came running through the condo screaming that she had seen Elvis fly by with another bird. She immediately ran out the back door in order to see where they went. She grabbed a plastic shopping bag and a stalk of millet and took off. By this time I was grieving. We got Elvis when he was 5 weeks old (just a chick). I sat back down and waited, and in about 10 minutes she knocked on the door and I ran to it and when I opened it she said, “I've got Elvis!” Elvis was weak and very happy to be back with us. I've never seen him eat so much.

We are both very much animal lovers. It kinda lets me know how tough wild animals really have it, especially with big industry taking up the wooded areas which is their home. Dianne and I both feel that Elvis was blessed from the very second that he flew into the Spiritual Grounds that Meher Baba left for his followers. When we come back to Myrtle Beach we are going to come by for a visit (through the front gate—sorry for trespassing). Thanks again. Please let everyone read this.

Love Robert, Dianne, and Elvis Harris

Book Review: The Circle of Life and Death, by Lawrence Karrasch with Rita Karrasch

2009-04-25T20:44:00.006-04:00

Rita and Larry Karrasch

The Circle of Life and Death: A Spiritual Guide for Living and Dying Well, by Lawrence Karrasch with Rita Karrasch (iUniverse, 2008), 180 pp. Available at Sheriar Books or iUniverse.

Reviewed by Kendra Crossen

If you set out for the first time to read about death and dying from a spiritual perspective, you would find a bewildering number of books to choose from. Larry Karrasch, in collaboration with his wife, Rita Karrasch, has done a valuable service by culling the core ideas from numerous traditions (thanks to the fact that they inherited a large library of such literature). The discussions cover universal law, the soul and spirit bodies (astral, subtle, mental), the development of consciousness, the after-death experience (a world created by one’s own thoughts), reincarnation, sanskaras, six types of death (normal, accidental, murder, suicide, capital punishment, and circumstantial deaths involving large numbers of people, as in wars and calamities), preparing for death, and specific topics such as the notion of waiting three to four days before disposing of a loved one’s remains, as suggested by Meher Baba, since the consciousness of the person may remain closely associated with the body for that period. Each chapter closes with a list that summarizes the essential ideas for the reader’s contemplation. The book is thus designed to provide a patient introduction for a general audience.

The reader won’t be hit over the head with “Meher Baba” in this book, yet the perspective of Baba—whom Larry met personally as a child on several occasions—informs the whole presentation, and there is also the influence of Larry’s mentor Dr. Harry Kenmore, one of Baba’s Western mandali. Source footnotes are provided, but Larry has not attempted to explain whether Baba specifically confirmed this or that teaching—I assume this is to ensure the book’s accessibility to non-Baba-lovers. As a gift, it would make a gentle introduction to Baba as well as to the purpose of death and how one can best learn the lessons that life and death have to offer.

If I had to choose one thing that is outstanding about this work, it is the way Larry establishes the entire subject within Meher Baba’s scheme of “the advancing stream of life”: the fact that, in Baba’s words, “life is a series of experiences which need innumerable forms. Death is an interval in that one long life.” The whole of life is moving toward a great purpose—liberation from the circle of life and death—and once this is recognized, existence takes on meaning and direction. This understanding gives the book its coherence, which I believe makes it easier for readers to digest all the unusual pieces of information being offered. As a writer Larry has a patient, systematic way of guiding the reader toward his conclusions about how best to follow the advancing stream. In addition, he provides fascinating nuggets from metaphysical, mediumistic, and mystical literature. Example: Upasni Maharaj stated that hanging—the taking of the breath—is the best method of execution. (The book also explainsd how capital punishment, often rejected on humane grounds, could serve a spiritual purpose.)

The interpretations of various teachers and authors, including Meher Baba, Edgar Cayce, Manly P. Hall, Annie Besant, C. W. Leadbeater, Rudolf Steiner, Hazrat Inayat Khan, Ivy O. Duce, and the Dalai Lama, are integrated into a unified narrative with a positive and uplifting tone. Larry writes: “Facing life’s challenges and overcoming obstacles are a part of why we return to the earth time and time again. But as we slow down and become more silent within, our intuition will help us to make the right decisions in life and avoid suffering.” Thank you, Larry and Rita, for this thoughtful compilation with occasional touches from your personal experience.

Excerpt from The Circle of Life and Death

When death finally comes, as it does for everyone, it should be faced with an inner conviction that “I have done this many times before.” But how does one awaken to this conviction? Most of us do not have a clear memory of ever having passed through death’s portal. Belief that there is something beyond the physical world is the first step in awakening this inner conviction. A trust in the individuals who experience and reveal the true nature of death can come when you open your mind and heart to the unseen world. Reading the written works of seers and advanced souls with an open mind is a second step. Mystical teachings from the major religions and esoteric philosophies contain stories written in allegories and literal accounts of the after-life. As we have experienced all this before, it should ring true in the very depths of our being. Discussions with other seekers in the search for truth will also shake off the cobwebs of our instilled childhood conceptions and fears about death.

Once awakened to the purpose of death, learning about the process of death and preparing for it should take on a new meaning for you. Since death could come to you and your loved ones at any time, you need to realize that you have no time to lose in this preparation. Every thought, word, feeling, and action in life will define your experience in the after-life. How you lived on earth creates the record for how you will exist in the after-life, which we call death.

Poems of Chaganti Subba Rao

2009-04-20T19:10:00.002-04:00

A small book, Meher Githa by Chaganti Subba Rao (1915-1991), in Telegu and English, was brought back from India. It was said that the author was an orthodox Hindu who was initially uninterested in meeting Meher Baba on His first visit to Hyderabad, but on the second visit he did come into Baba’s embrace. Here is a brief excerpt from his “Githa” or song of Meher.

1. Myself Am Baba Himself

I am the bee and He the flower,

I am the flower and He the bower,

I am the servant and He the master,

I am the sheep and He the pastor.

I am the brook and He the ocean,

I am the stone and He the mountain,

I am the son and He the father,

I am the child and He the mother.

I am the cart and He the driver,

I am the instrument and He the doer.

There is between us not a gulf,

I myself am Baba Himself.

2. Tell Me, O! The Highest of the High

Your celestial embrace I care not,

Trample me beneath Your feet; care a jot.

I cannot for long stand in queue

For Your love; but I shall become You…

Time, space and distance cannot me bind,

though I to You am a new find;

I am chakora bird and You the moon,

I await Your ray of grace for a boon.

Let eyes shed hearing Your name,

Let hairs stand on end counting Your fame,

Let tears choke the throat seeing Your form,

Let body be lost realizing Your charm.

You steal my heart though not the thief,

You control my mind though not the chief,

I know not fully I love you why,

Tell me, O Highest of the High!

…

8. A Wayfarer

Penance I do not know,

To yoga I do not go,

My heart I do not show.

I am still a wayfarer.

Yourself I do not know,

Myself too ditto.

Why should I make a show?

I am only a wayfarer.

Love is hard to give,

But You want it anyhow,

Still I cannot give it now,

As I am a wayfarer.

Every milestone is the goal

So You always me cajole.

How many miles do I have to crawl

As a weary wayfarer?

You say, “You speak nonsense!”

But let me tell You once

To give me another chance,

Since I am a wayfarer.

2009-04-08T08:17:00.004-04:00

“Only love interests me, and

I am only in contact with things I love.”

—Marc Chagall

A friend shared this beautiful quote. It makes me reflect that although I cannot control what events come my way—and some of them may involve experiences that are not imbued with love—I can always go deep within myself to find the place of Love, no matter what my outer surroundings are; for Meher Baba has shown me this place.

Video Snippet from the 2009 Southeast Gathering for Meher Baba

2009-04-06T06:38:00.006-04:00

At this weekend's Southeast Gathering, Charles Haynes talks about how Eruch used to say, "This is what I have gathered..." when sharing his understanding of Meher Baba's wish. He also comments that Elizabeth Patterson would never say, "Baba wants you to ..." but would instead say, "It came to me last night..." One would feel that it came from Baba; yet she never made that claim. Thanks to Angi West for this video. I got it from her blog.

A Story Meher Baba Enjoyed

2009-04-03T23:09:00.004-04:00

Tonight at Meher Center we saw a beautiful video of Arnavaz Dadachanji (who passed away earlier this year), taken in the early 1970s, in which she told a story that Baba enjoyed having read to him. Although Arnavaz gave a summary of the story, I found a more complete version on the Internet, so I slightly edited it to make it simpler. Here is the story, and then I'll tell you what Arnavaz said about Baba's reaction to the story.

A great painter was engaged to create a mural for the cathedral in a Sicilian town. The subject was the life of Christ. The painter labored for many years, and finally the painting was finished except for the two most important figures: the Christ Child and Judas Iscariot. He searched far and wide for suitable models.

One day while walking in the city, he saw some children playing in the street. Among them was a young boy whose face stirred the painter's heart. He took the child home with him, and for days the boy sat patiently until the face of the Christ Child was finished.

But the painter still had found no model for the portrait of Judas. The story of the unfinished masterpiece spread afar, and many men, believing themselves to be wicked-looking, offered to pose as Judas. But the old painter continued to search for the right model, envisioning him as a man beaten down by life, weakened by greed and lust.

Then one afternoon as he sat in a tavern, a miserable man in rags staggered into the tavern begging for wine. The startled painter looked into a face that seemed to bear the marks of every sin of mankind. Greatly excited, he said, “Come with me, and I will give you wine."

For many days the painter worked feverishly to complete his masterpiece. As the work went on, a change came over the model as he looked with horror on the painted likeness of himself. One day, perceiving his subject's agitation, the painter paused in his work. “My son,” he said, “what troubles you so?”

The man buried his face in his hands, sobbing. After a long moment he lifted pleading eyes to the old painter's face. "'Do you not remember me? Years ago I was your model for the Christ Child."

Arnavaz described the beautiful look of love and compassion that came over Baba's face upon hearing this story, and he said: "Without Judas there could have been no Christ. . . . I loved Judas very much, when I was Jesus."

Johnny Doe

2009-04-01T07:40:00.006-04:00

To my post of 30 March I want to add a phrase (not from the Anglo-Indian dictionary I mentioned in the preceding post) that was a favorite of Kitty Davy's: Jannay do, Hindi for "Forget about it." She pronounced it something like "Johnny Doe." It's a good affirmation for dismissing worries and letting go of negative emotions.

“How slow all are to learn this lesson of control,” Kitty wrote. “Yet when we fail, Baba does not want us to brood. He does not like excessive remorse and tears, but says, 'Now go; forget about it and do not brood. Throw it all over. It no longer exists. Be happy, be cheerful. This is my order.'” (Thanks to Jill Davis for that quote from Treasures from the Meher Baba Journals.)

Indian Vocabulary Test

2009-03-30T09:03:00.006-04:00

A number of you said you enjoyed the vocabulary post, so here's another one for Kendra’s Believe It or Don’t (which I posted some years ago on the Baba-Talk Listserv; I have slightly updated it):

Indian Vocabulary Test

Can you define these words? The definitions below are adapted from a marvelous reference book, Sahibs, Nabobs and Boxwallahs: A Dictionary of the Words of Anglo-India by Ivor Lewis (Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).

1. boxwallah

2. chikan

3. bheestie

4. achcha

5. chello

6. jungli

7. kohinoor

8. kendra

9. goondah

10. baba

ANSWERS

1. Boxwallah. Orig. an itinerant peddler or packman; later a shopkeeper, retailer, or businessman. I have been told that a "workingbox" is a typewriter. The late Feram Workingboxwallah was the translator of Bhau Kalchuri's Lord Meher volumes from Hindi into English. And of course wallah (Hindi wala) is a masculine suffix meaning a person who performs any act or job or fulfills any function. The feminine is walli. So, for example, the book walli of the Love Street Bookstore is Kathy Hill.

2. Chikan, or sometimes "chicken" (from Hindi/Persian chikin, “art needlework”). Embroidery, especially the kind from Lucknow. Ever shop at the Lucknow chikan store in the Wonderland shopping mall in Pune? That's where you get those shirts and kameezes (the tunic tops of Punjabi outfits) with the dainty embroidery on the front. Come to think of it, the embroidery looks a little like chicken tracks...what a bizarre coincidence.

3. Bheestie. From Hindi bhisti via Persian bihishti, from bihisht, "paradise." An Indian water-carrier who carried his burden in a goatskin waterbag. This lowly menial was endowed after the Indian fashion with the elevated title of "Man of Paradise," jocularly metamorphosed by the British into "beastie."

4. Achcha. A frequent expression of approval, interrogation, surprise, doubt, wonder, admiration, understanding, etc., often accompanied by an expressive and appropriate shake of the head.

5. Chello. Go speedily! Get on! Let's go! Scram! A useful word to know when traveling in India. You say goodbye—I say chello! Have you ever sung along with the song "Gate Chelo" at Meherabad? (Gate is pronounced "gah-tay.") It means "Let's go singing." In the talk by Jimmy Khan that I posted on 8 Sept. 2007, he described music programs at Guruprasad with Baba and said that the last song was always “Gate Chelo,” which means “Sing His praises and move on.” Jimmy said, "But who would want to move on and leave Baba for the afternoon?"

6. Jungli. An inhabitant of the jungle; uncouth, unrefined. You know who you are!

7. Kohinoor. "Mountain of light," the name of one of the most magnificent diamonds in the world. This gem from India is now one of the British crown jewels. Figuratively, the word means the most superb thing of its kind; hence the name of the Kohinoor department store in Ahmednagar. (That store is quite nice; but have you ever noticed how the shabbiest little hole-in-the-wall shops will have exalted names, like "Chikki Palace" or "Perfection Departmental Store"?)

8. Kendra. Center or circle. The Avatar Meher Baba Kendra is the Baba center of Ahmednagar. Since my name is Kendra, Bhau addresses me as “Center” and sometimes even as “Center of the Universe”! (There's at least one other Kendra Baba-lover, a young Australian, who I believe gets the same honorfic from Bhau.) Dadi Kerawala in Meherabad used to have a board on his wall where keys are hanging on hooks, labeled underneath as to what the key is for. I was startled to see "Kendra" written up there; he said it was the key to an "office." Actually, I first discovered this word when I was about 15 years old and a very cool boyfriend took me to an Indian dance performance; I looked down at the program and was shocked to see my name. It was part of the name of the dance company, the something-Kala Kendra. The word kendra also refers to one of the angular houses in Jyotish, or Vedic astrology. My name, Kendra, is really Anglo-Saxon, and I was told it means "Knowing Woman." (But my wise mother once told me, "You don't have to know everything.")

9. Goondah. A hired rowdy, desperado, hooligan. I wonder if that famous phrase "a lustful desperado" from the three-volume edition of Baba's Discourses ("when one's mother's honour is on the point of being violated by a lustful desperado")might have been a translation of goondah. It was in one of the discourses on violence and nonviolence (the suituation of a lustful desperado ; it was regrettably changed in the 1987 ed. to "a lustful man."

10. Baba. Title of respect for father, grandfather and child. Also, applied to children by Anglo-Indians as a term of endearment. One time a mother and daughter met Baba. The mother introduced her adult daughter, saying, "Baba, this is my baby." The daughter burst out, "Baba, she is more a baby than I am." Baba said, "Baba means baby, so we are all three babies!" The Perfect One always finds the perfect resolution to any conflict!