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His name
is Meher Baba,
____and He
is the Avatar of the Age.
Meher Baba, which means Compassionate
Father, also called The Awakener, was originally named Merwan Sheriar Irani, (born
Feb. 25, 1894, Poona, India—died Jan. 31, 1969, Ahmednagar, India). He
was a spiritual master in western India with a sizable following both in that country and abroad. Beginning July 10, 1925,
he observed silence for the last 44 years of his life, communicating with his disciples at first through an alphabet board
but increasingly with gestures. He observed that he had come "Not to teach but to awaken," adding that, "Things that are real
are given and received in silence."He was born into a Zoroastrian family of Persian descent and was educated in Poona, India,
and attended Deccan College there. It was there, at the age of 19, that he met an aged Muslim woman, Hazrat Babjan, the first
of five "perfect masters" (spiritually enlightened or "God-realized" persons) who over the next seven years helped him find
his own spiritual identity. That identity, Meher Baba said, was as the Avatar of this age, interpreting that Vedantic term
to meanthe periodic incarnation of God in human form.1 He placed himself among such universal religious
figures as Zoroaster, Rama, Krishna, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed. " I am the same 'Ancient One'2
come again into your midst," he told his disciples, declaring that all major religions are revelations of "that One Reality
which is God."3
Meher Baba's cosmology may be
summarized as follows: the goal of all life is to realize the absolute oneness of God, from whom the universe emanated
as a result of (a) (the) whim of unconscious divinity to know itself (consciously) as Conscious Divinity.
Starting with rudimentary, undeveloped but at the same time, sentient consciousness, in pursuit of the full consciousness
of self-realized Divine Consciousness, there follows an evolution of forms, which occurs in seven stages:
stone or metal, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal, and eventually and finally,
human.4 Every individualized soul must experience all these forms in order to gain full consciousness.
Once consciousness is attained, the burden of impressions,5 which holds one tethered to
the endlesswheel of birth and death, and which have accumulated through all these forms, prevents the soul from realizing
its identity with God through the false habit of always having identified with the myriad of changing forms. To gain
this realization the individual must traverse an inward spiritual path, eliminating all these false impressions of individuality
and eventuating in the knowledge of the "Real Self " as God, with full, conscious experience.
Meher Baba saw his work as awakening
the world through love to a new consciousness of oneness of all life. To that end he lived a life of love and service which
included extensive work with the poor, the physically and mentally ill, and many others, including such tasks as feeding the
poor, cleaning the latrines of untouchables and bathing lepers. He saw a responsibility to give spiritual help to "advanced
souls," and traveled throughout the Indian subcontinent to find such persons.
These outward activities Meher
Baba saw as indications of the inner transformation of consciousness that he came to give the world. He established
and later dismantled many institutions of service, which he compared to scaffolding temporarily erected to construct a building
that really was within the human heart. He said that a "new humanity" would emerge from his life's work, and that he would
bring about an unprecedented release of divine love in the world.
Between 1931 and 1958 he made
many visits to the United States and Europe, on one such trip in 1952 establishing the Meher Spiritual Center in
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. A similar center, Avatar's Abode, was created at Woombye, Queensland, Australia in
1958.
From the mid-1960's Meher Baba
was in seclusion, and during that period several U.S. drug experimenters were drawn to him in a quest for spiritual truth.
Through them his admonitions against the non-medical use of psychedelic and other drugs came to the attention of the news
media in the U.S. and the West. He warned young people explicitly that "drugs are harmful mentally, physically, and spiritually,"
trying to draw them away from drugs and toward a spiritual life.
Meher Baba never sought to form
a sect or proclaim a dogma; he attracted and welcomed followers of many faiths and every social class with a message emphasizing
love and compassion, the elimination of the selfish ego, and the potential of realizing God within themselves. Although his
equation of the several manifestations of God was syncretic, he won many followers from sects and denominations that
repudiated syncretism, and encouraged those followers to be strong in their original faiths.
After his death his followers
heeded his wish that they not form an organization, but continued to gather informally and often to discuss and read his works
and express through music, poetry, dance, or drama their reflections on his life. His tomb at Meherabad, near Ahmednagar,
has become a place of pilgrimage for his followers throughout the world. His books include Discourses (1938-1943;
the earliest dictated on an alphabet board, the other by gesture), God Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose
(1955), and The Everything and the Nothing (1963).

--Through Boundless Space, Infinite in Time--
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