Meher Baba
Meher Baba was an Indian spiritual master who said he was the Avatar, or the total manifestation of God in human form. A spiritual figure of the 20th century, he had a following of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in India, with a smaller number of followers in North America, Europe, South America, and Australia.
Meher Baba's map of consciousness has been described as "a unique amalgam of Sufi, Vedic, and Yogic terminology". He taught that the goal of all beings was to become conscious of their own divinity, and to realise the oneness of God.
At the age of 19, Meher Baba began a seven-year period of spiritual transformation, during which he had encounters with Hazrat Babajan, Upasni Maharaj, Sai Baba of Shirdi, Tajuddin Baba, and Narayan Maharaj. In 1925, he began a 44-year period of silence, during which he communicated first using an alphabet board and by 1954 entirely through hand gestures using an interpreter. Meher Baba died on 31 January 1969 and was entombed at Meherabad. His tomb, or "samadhi", has become a place of pilgrimage for his followers, often known as "Baba lovers".
Overview of teachings
Meher Baba's teachings concerned the nature and purpose of life. He described the phenomenal world as illusory, and taught that the universe is imagination. He taught that God alone exists, and each soul is God passing through imagination in order to realise its own divinity. He advised followers wishing to attain God-realisation, emphasizing love and selfless-service. His other teachings included discussion of Perfect Masters, the Avatar, spiritual aspirants, and the various stages of the spiritual path, which he termed involution. God Speaks and Discourses are regarded as among his most important written works.For decades he declined to speak and later refrained from communicating via written language. This practice has remained a topic of discussion among some of his followers.
Wider influence
His legacy includes the Avatar Meher Baba Charitable Trust he established in India, and a handful of centers for information and pilgrimage. He has influenced pop culture creators and introduced the slogan "Don't worry; be happy". This was used in Bobby McFerrin's hit 1988 song of the same name. Among his followers were well-known musicians such as Melanie Safka and Pete Townshend, as well as journalists including Sir Tom Hopkinson.In 1971, Meher Baba's following in the United States was estimated at 7,000 people. Some commentators have suggested that the size of the movement has been underestimated due to the rarity of proselytising by Meher Baba's followers, and that in 1975, the movement was larger than the more visible Hare Krishna movement.
Meher Baba was accepted as the leader of a Sufi organization based in California which he renamed Sufism Reoriented. Meher Baba's Sufi influence is said to have drawn from Sai Baba of Shirdi, whom Meher Baba designated as a Qutb. However, some commentators have asserted that Meher Baba's interpretation of Sufism shared very few similarities with the Sufi Movement apart from universalism and anti-dogmatism.
Life and works
Early life
Meher Baba was born to Irani Zoroastrian parents in 1894 in Pune, India. He was named Merwan Sheriar Irani, the second son of Sheriar Irani and Shireen Irani. Sheriar Irani was a Persian Zoroastrian from Khorramshahr who had spent years wandering in search of spiritual experiences before settling in Pune.As a boy, Baba formed the Cosmopolitan Club, which was dedicated to remaining informed on world affairs and donating money to charity. He was a multi-instrumentalist and poet. Fluent in several languages, he was fond of the poetry of Hafez, William Shakespeare, and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
His spiritual transformation began when he was 19 years old and lasted for seven years. At 19, he met Hazrat Babajan, an elderly Muslim saint. He was cycling past a tree that she had made her abode, when she called to him. When he approached her, she kissed him on the forehead, causing him to enter a nine-month-long trance which he described as "divine bliss", with a lack of consciousness of his body. Babajan predicted that he would become a spiritual leader. He then encountered Upasni Maharaj, who he later said helped him to integrate his mystical experiences with ordinary consciousness, thus enabling him to function in the world without diminishing his experience of God-realisation.
Over the next several years, he encountered other spiritual figures, namely Tajuddin Baba, Narayan Maharaj, and Sai Baba of Shirdi, who, along with Babajan and Upasni Maharaj, Baba later said were the five "Perfect Masters" of the age. By early 1922, at the age of 27, Baba began gathering his own disciples. They gave him the name Meher Baba, which means "compassionate father".
In 1922, Meher Baba and his followers established Manzil-e-Meem in Mumbai. There, Baba commenced his practice of demanding strict discipline and obedience from his disciples. A year later, Baba and his mandali moved to an area a few miles outside Ahmednagar which he named Meherabad. This ashram would become the center for his work. During the 1920s, Meher Baba opened a school, hospital, and dispensary at Meherabad, all of which were free and open to all castes and faiths.
From 10 July 1925 until the end of his life, Meher Baba maintained silence. He now communicated first through chalk and slate, then by an alphabet board, and later via a unique repertoire of gestures. On 1 December 1926, he wrote his last message, and began relying on an alphabet board. With his mandali, he spent long periods in seclusion, during which he often fasted. He also traveled widely, held public gatherings, and engaged in works of charity with lepers and the poor.
1930–1939: First contact with the West
Beginning in 1931, Meher Baba made the first of many visits to the West. Throughout that decade, Meher Baba began a period of world travel and took several trips to Europe and the United States. It was during this period that he established contact with his first close group of Western disciples. He traveled on a Persian passport, as he had given up writing, as well as speaking, and would not sign the forms required by the British government of India.On his first trip to England in 1931, he traveled on the SS Rajputana, at the same time as Mahatma Gandhi, who was sailing to the second Round Table Conference in London. Baba and Gandhi met three times on board. One of these exchanges lasted for three hours. The British press publicized these meetings, but an aide to Gandhi said, "You may say emphatically that Gandhi never asked Meher Baba for help or for spiritual or other advice."
In the West, Meher Baba met with a number of celebrities and artists, including Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, Tallulah Bankhead, Boris Karloff, Tom Mix, Maurice Chevalier, and Ernst Lubitsch. On 1 June 1932, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. held a reception for Baba at Pickfair at which he delivered a message to Hollywood. As a result, says Robert S. Ellwood, Meher Baba emerged as "one of the enthusiasms of the '30s".
In 1934, after announcing that he would break his self-imposed silence in the Hollywood Bowl, Baba changed his plans abruptly, boarded the RMS Empress of Canada, and sailed to Hong Kong without explanation. The Associated Press reported that "Baba had decided to postpone the word-fast-breaking until next February because 'conditions are not yet ripe'." He returned to England in 1936, but did not return to the United States again until the early 1950s.
In the late 1930s, Meher Baba invited a group of Western women to join him in India, where he arranged a series of trips throughout India and British Ceylon that became known as the Blue Bus Tours. When the tour returned home, many newspapers treated their journey as an occasion for scandal. Time magazine's 1936 review of God Is My Adventure describes the US's fascination with the "long-haired, silky-mustached Parsee named Shri Sadgaru Meher Baba" four years earlier.
1940–1949: Masts and the New Life
In the 1930s and 1940s, Meher Baba worked with masts, or those "intoxicated with God". According to Baba, these individuals are disabled by their enchanting experience of the higher spiritual planes. Although outwardly masts may appear irrational or insane, Baba claimed that their spiritual status was elevated, and that by meeting with them he helped them to progress spiritually while enlisting their aid in his spiritual work. One of these masts, Mohammed, lived at Meher Baba's encampment at Meherabad until his death in 2003.During his journey in 1946, Meher Baba went to Sehwan Sharif to meet a Sufi saint and descendant of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Murshid Nadir Ali Shah, whom Baba referred to as an advanced pilgrim.
In 1949, Baba began a period that he called the New Life. Following a series of questions on their readiness to obey even the most difficult of his requests, Baba selected twenty companions to join him in a life of complete "hopelessness and helplessness".
He made provisions for those dependent on him, after which he and his companions otherwise gave up nearly all property and financial responsibilities. They traveled around India incognito while begging for food and carrying out Baba's instructions according to a strict set of conditions, including acceptance of any circumstance and consistent good cheer in the face of any difficulty. Companions who failed to comply were sent away.
Concerning the New Life, Meher Baba wrote:
Meher Baba ended the New Life in February 1952 and once again began a round of public appearances throughout India and the West.
1950–1959: ''God Speaks'' and automobile accidents
After being injured as a passenger in two serious automobile accidents, one near Prague, Oklahoma in the United States in 1952, and one in India in 1956, Meher Baba's ability to walk became limited.In the 1950s, Baba established two centers outside of India, namely the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in the United States and Avatar's Abode near Brisbane, Australia. He inaugurated the Meher Spiritual Center in April 1952. On 24 May 1952, en route from the Meher Spiritual Center to Meher Mount in Ojai, California, the car in which he was a passenger was struck head-on near Prague, Oklahoma. He and his companions were thrown from the vehicle and injured. Baba's leg was severely broken and he sustained facial injuries including a broken nose. The injured were treated at Prague Memorial Hospital, after which they returned to Myrtle Beach to recuperate. While recuperating at Youpon Dunes, a home owned by Elizabeth Patterson, he worked on the charter for a group of Sufis, which he named Sufism Reoriented.
In August 1953, in Dehradun, Meher Baba began dictating his major book, God Speaks, The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose. He dedicated this book "To the the Illusion that sustains Reality". In September 1954, Meher Baba gave a men-only sahavas at Meherabad that later became known as the Three Incredible Weeks. During this time Baba issued a declaration, "Meher Baba's Call", wherein he once again affirmed his Avatarhood "irrespective of the doubts and convictions" of others. At the end of this sahavas, Meher Baba gave the completed manuscript of his book God Speaks to two members of Sufism Reoriented, Ludwig H. Dimpfl and Don E. Stevens, for editing and publication in America. The book was published by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year.
On 30 September 1954, Meher Baba gave his Final Declaration message.
In October 1954, Meher Baba discarded his alphabet board and began using a unique set of hand gestures to communicate, which he used for the rest of his life.
On 2 December 1956, outside Satara, India, the car in which Meher Baba was riding lost control and a second serious automobile accident occurred. Baba suffered a fractured pelvis and other severe injuries. Nilu, one of Baba's mandali, was killed. This collision seriously incapacitated Baba. Despite his physicians' predictions, Baba began to walk again, but from that point was in constant pain and had limited mobility. During his trip to the West in 1958, he often needed to be carried from venue to venue.
In 1956, during his fifth visit to the United States, Baba stayed at New York's Hotel Delmonico before traveling to the Meher Spiritual Center at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. In July he traveled to Washington, D.C., and received friends and disciples at the home of Ivy Duce, wife of James Terry Duce, the vice-president of the Arabian American Oil Company. He then traveled to Meher Mount at Ojai, California before proceeding to Australia. His final visits to the United States and Australia were made in 1958.