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).