Search for God

Discourses by Meher Baba

MOST persons do not even suspect the existence of God and naturally they are not very keen about God. There are others who, through the influence of tradition, belong to some faith or another and catch the belief in the existence of God from their surroundings. Their faith is just strong enough to keep them bound to certain rituals, ceremonies or beliefs and rarely possesses that vitality which is necessary to bring about a radical change in one’s entire attitude towards life.There are still others who are philosophically minded and have an inclination to believe in the existence of God either because of their own speculations or because of the assertions of others. For them, God is at best an hypothesis or an intellectual idea. Such lukewarm belief in itself can never be sufficient incentive for launching upon a serious search for God. Such persons do not know of God from personal knowledge, and for them God is not an object of intense desire or endeavour.

A true aspirant is not content with knowledge of spiritual realities based on hearsay, nor is he satisfied with pure inferential knowledge. For him the spiritual realities are not the object of idle thinking, and the acceptance or rejection of these realities is fraught with momentous implications for his inner life. Hence he naturally insists upon direct knowledge about them. This may be illustrated from the life of a great sage. One day he was discussing spiritual topics with a friend who was quite advanced upon the Path. While they were engaged in this discussion their attention was diverted to a dead body which was being carried past them. “This is the end of the body but not of the soul,” the friend remarked. “Have you seen the soul?” asked the sage. “No,” the friend answered. The sage remained sceptical about the soul, for he insisted upon personal knowledge.

Although the aspirant cannot be content with secondhand knowledge or mere guesses, he does not close his mind to the possibility that there could be spiritual realities which had not come within his experience. In other words, he is conscious of the limitations of his own individual experience and refrains from making it the measure of all possibilities. He has an open mind towards all things which are beyond the scope of his experience. While he does not accept them on hearsay, he also does not rush to deny them. The limitation of experience often tends to restrict the scope of imagination, and thus a person comes to believe that there are no realities other than those which may have come within the ken of his past experience; but usually some incidents or happenings in his own life will cause him to break out of his dogmatic enclosure and become really open-minded.

This stage of transition may also be illustrated by a story from the life of the same sage, who happened to be a prince. Some days after the incident mentioned above, as he was riding on horse-back he came upon a pedestrian advancing towards him. Since the way of the horse was blocked by the presence of the pedestrian, the sage arrogantly ordered the man out of the way. The pedestrian refused, so the sage dismounted and the following conversation was held: “Who are you?” asked the pedestrian. “I am the Prince,” answered the sage. “But I do not know you to be the Prince,” said the pedestrian and continued, “I shall accept you as a Prince only when I know you to be a Prince and not otherwise.” This encounter awakened the sage to the fact that God may exist even though he did not know Him from personal experience, just as he was actually a Prince although the pedestrian did not know it from his own personal experience. Now that his mind was open to the possible existence of God, he set himself to the task of deciding that question in earnest.

God either exists or does not exist. If He exists, search for Him is amply justified. And if He does not exist, there is nothing to lose by seeking Him. But man does not usually turn to a real search for God as a matter of voluntary and joyous enterprise. He has to be driven to this search by disillusionment with those worldly things which allure him and from which he cannot deflect his mind. Ordinary man is completely engrossed in his activities in the gross world. He lives through its manifold experiences of joys and sorrows without even suspecting the existence of a deeper Reality. He tries as best he can to have pleasures of the senses and to avoid different kinds of suffering.

“Eat, drink and be merry” is his philosophy, but in spite of his unceasing search for pleasure he cannot altogether avoid suffering, and even when he succeeds in having pleasures of the senses he is often satiated by them. While he thus goes through the daily round of varied experiences, there often arises some occasion when he begins to ask himself, “What is the end of all this?” Such a thought may arise from some untoward happening for which the person is not mentally prepared. It may be the frustration of some confident expectation, or it may be an important change in his situation demanding radical readjustment and the giving up of established ways of thought and conduct. Usually such an occasion arises from the frustration of some deep craving. If a deep craving happens to meet an impasse so that there is not the slightest chance of its ever being fulfilled, the psyche receives such a shock that it can no longer accept the type of life which may have been accepted hitherto without question.

Under such circumstances a person may be driven to utter desperation, and if the tremendous power which is generated by the psychic disturbance remains uncontrolled and undirected, it may even lead to serious mental derangement or attempts to commit suicide. Such a catastrophe overcomes those in whom desperateness is allied with thoughtlessness, for they allow impulse to have free and full sway. The unharnessed power of desperateness can only work destruction. The desperateness of a thoughtful person under similar circumstances is altogether different in results because the energy which it releases is intelligently harnessed and directed towards a purpose. In the moment of such divine desperateness a man makes the important decision to discover and realise the aim

of life. There thus comes into existence a true search for lasting values. Henceforth the burning query which refuses to be silenced is, “What does it all lead to?”

When the psychic energy of a man is thus centred upon discovering the goal of life, he uses the power of desperateness creatively. He can no longer be content with the fleeting things of this life and he is thoroughly sceptical about the ordinary values which he had so far accepted without doubt. His only desire is to find the Truth at any cost and he does not rest satisfied with anything short of the Truth. Divine desperateness is the beginning of spiritual awakening because it gives rise to aspiration for God-realisation. In the moment of divine desperateness, when everything seems to give way, man decides to take any risk to ascertain what of significance to his life lies behind the veil.

All the usual solaces have failed him, but at the same time his inner voice refuses to reconcile itself completely with the position that life is devoid of all meaning. If he does not posit some hidden reality which he has not hitherto known, then there is nothing at all worth living for. For him there are only two alternatives: either there is a hidden spiritual reality which prophets have described as God, or everything is meaningless. The second alternative is utterly unacceptable to the whole of man’s personality, so he must try the first alternative. Thus man turns to God when he is at bay in worldly affairs.

Now since there is no direct access to this hidden reality which he posits, he inspects his usual experiences for possible avenues leading to a significant beyond. Thus he goes back to his usual experiences with the purpose of gathering some light on the Path. This involves looking at everything from a new angle of vision and entails a reinterpretation of each experience. He now not only has experience but tries to fathom its spiritual significance. He is not merely concerned with what it is but with what it means in the march towards this hidden goal of existence. All this careful revaluation of experience results in his gaining an insight which could not come to him before he begins his new search.

Revaluation of an experience amounts to a new bit of wisdom, and each addition to spiritual wisdom necessarily brings about a modification of one’s general attitude towards life. So the purely intellectual search for God or the hidden spiritual reality, has its reverberations in the practical life of a man. His life now becomes a real experiment with perceived spiritual values.

The more he carries on this intelligent and purposive experimentation with his own life the deeper becomes his comprehension of the true meaning of life, until finally he discovers that as he is undergoing a complete transformation of his psychic being he is arriving at a true perception of the real significance of life as it is. With a clear and tranquil vision of the real nature and worth of life he realises that God Whom he has been so desperately seeking is no stranger nor hidden and foreign entity. He is Reality itself and not a hypothesis. He is Reality seen with undimmed vision—that very Reality of which he is a part and in which he has had his entire being and with which he is in fact identical. So, though he begins by seeking something utterly new, he really arrives at a new understanding of an ancient thing. The spiritual journey does not consist in arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he was not. It consists in the dissipation of his ignorance concerning himself and life and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins with spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one’s own Self.

Good and Evil

Discourses by Meher Baba

THE human mind is not only going through experiences but is constantly evaluating them. Some experiences are regarded as agreeable and some disagreeable; some experiences are found to bring happiness and some suffering; some experiences are received as being pleasant and some unpleasant; some experiences are apprehended as restricting the life of man and some as leading it towards fullness and freedom; and some experiences are looked upon as being good and some bad. These are the opposites created by human imagination when it is meeting life with a particular point of view.

Man’s conception of what is acceptable or unacceptable goes on evolving and changing according to the nature of desires which happen to be dominant at any particular moment. But, as long as there is any kind of desire in his mind, he is impelled to appraise his experience in relation to that desire and divide it into two parts, the one contributing towards its fulfillment and therefore acceptable, and the other tending to prevent its fulfillment and therefore unacceptable. Instead of meeting life and all that it brings without expectation, entanglement or shirking, the mind creates a standard whereby it divides life into opposites, one of which is regarded as acceptable and the other as not acceptable.

Of the opposites created by the human mind the division between good and bad is spiritually most significant. It is based upon man’s desire to be free from the limitation of all desires. Those experiences and actions which increase the fetters of desire are bad, and those experiences and actions which tend to emancipate the mind from limiting desires are good. Since good experiences and actions also exist in relation to desire, they also bind in the same way as do bad experiences and actions. All binding can truly disappear only when all desires disappear; therefore true freedom comes when good and bad balance each other and become so merged into each other that they leave no room for any choice by the limited self of desire.

When human consciousness is fully developed we already find in it a preponderance of bad elements, since at the sub-human stages of evolution consciousness has been chiefly operating under limiting tendencies like lust, greed and anger. The experiences and actions created and sustained by such ego-centered tendencies have left their imprints on the developing mind and the mind has stored these imprints in the same manner as film records the movement of actors. It is therefore easy to be bad and difficult to be good. Animal life, from which human consciousness emerges, is mostly determined by animal lust, animal greed and animal anger, though some animals do at times develop the good qualities of self-sacrifice, love and patience. If all the accumulated animal sanskaras had been bad and none good, the appearance of good tendencies in human consciousness would have been impossible.

Though some animal sanskaras are good, most are bad; so, at the start, human consciousness finds itself subject to a propelling force which is mostly bad. Right from the beginning of human evolution, the problem of emancipation consists in cultivating and developing good sanskaras so that they may overlap and annul the accumulated sanskaras. The cultivation of good sanskaras is achieved by fostering experiences and actions which are opposite to those that predominate in animal life. The opposite of lust is love, the opposite of greed is generosity, and the opposite of anger is tolerance or patience. By trying to dwell in love, generosity and tolerance, man can erase the tendencies of lust, greed and anger.

The general process of freeing oneself from the limitation of sanskaras has, therefore, to be accompanied by the process of renouncing the bad for the good. But whether a person happens to be good or bad at any given time is dependent upon the inexorable operation of his sanskaras. From this point of view the sinner and the saint are both what they are according to the laws operative in the universe. They have both the same beginning and the same end. The sinner need not have the stigma of eternal degradation and the saint need not have pride in his moral attainments. No one, however saintly he may be, has attained the heights of moral virtues except after a life of moral failings, and no one is so bad as to be unable to improve and become good. Everyone, no matter how depraved, can gradually become better and better until he becomes the best example for all mankind. There is always hope for everyone; none is utterly lost and none need despair. It remains true, however, that the way to divinity lies through the renunciation of evil in favour of the good.

The gradual unfoldment of good brings in its train love, generosity and peace. The good sanskaras deposited by the manifestations of these qualities overlap and balance the opposite bad sanskaras of lust, greed and anger. When there is an exact balancing and overlapping of good and bad sanskaras there is at once a termination of both types of sanskaras and the precipitation of consciousness from a state of bondage to a state of freedom. The credit and debit sides must be exactly equal to each other if the account is to be closed. But usually, either the debit side is greater or the credit side is greater and the account is kept running. It is important to note that the account is kept running not only by excess of the debit side but also by excess of the credit side. It can be closed only when the two sides balance each other. In the field of sanskaras such balance is a rare happening because at any particular time, either the good or bad sanskaras are predominant. Just as the account can be kept running by excess of either the debit or credit side, so the life of the limited self is prolonged and sustained through the excess of either bad or good sanskaras. The limited self can linger through good sanskaras as well as bad sanskaras. What is required for its final extinction is an exact balancing and overlapping of the bad and good sanskaras.

The problem of the exact balancing and overlapping of the good and bad sanskaras is not a mathematical problem of matching equal amounts. If it were purely a question of equal quantities it could be solved solely through the persistent accumulation of the good sanskaras .

If there is a cessation or slowing down of the accumulation of bad sanskaras, and if, side by side, there is an unceasing accumulation of good sanskaras at a greater rate, sooner or later good sanskaras would be a quantitative match for the accumulated bad sanskaras and they would effect the necessary balancing. For emancipation of consciousness, the good and bad sanskaras have not only to balance each other in strength, but there has to be a point to point overlapping of the one opposite by the other. So, in a sense, the problem before each centre of consciousness is a specific problem relating to the qualitative variety of the nature of accumulated sanskaras.

If the accumulation of good sanskaras proceeds irrespective of the specific constitution of the existing sanskaras, there is a possibility of accumulating in some directions an excess of good sanskaras, side by side with the existence of bad sanskaras of a different type. For example, through self-mortification and severe types of asceticism some forms of attachment might be annulled but other forms of attachment may remain untouched by these practices and may continue to exist. The aspirant is not only likely to ignore the forms of attachment which have remained untouched, but he may even carry on further his practices of self-mortification and asceticism by the propelling force of the sanskaras created by these very practices. In such case an excess of good sanskaras is being created without termination of the limited ego. Even if the other forms of attachment remaining untouched are subsequently undone, the ego can get transferred to these new good sanskaras and continue to live through them.

Emancipation is not a matter of mere accumulation of virtue, it requires intelligent adjustment of sanskaras. Each centre of consciousness is unconsciously gravitating towards the final emancipation of Truth-realisation, and there is a natural tendency in the mind to invite to itself just that opposite which would meet the spiritual requirements of the situation. But it is not a mechanical and automatic process which can be left to itself independent of intelligent and right effort on the part of the aspirant. More often than not the aspirant finds it impossible to strike upon the really needful unless he has the good fortune to have the unfailing help of the Master, who alone has a direct and unerring insight into exactly what is necessary in a specific case.

It has been seen that good sanskaras can be the medium for the lingering life of the limited self. When a person looks upon himself as being good and not bad, he is engaged in self-affirmation through identification with this conviction, which is a continuation of separative existence in a new form. In some cases this new house which the ego constructs for itself is more difficult to dismantle, because self-identification with the good is often more complete than self-identification with the bad. Identification with the bad is easier to deal with because, as soon as the bad is perceived as being bad, its grip on consciousness becomes less firm. The loosening of the grip of the good presents a more difficult problem, since the good carries a semblance of self-justification through favourable contrast with the bad. However, in course of time the aspirant gets tired of his new prison-house, and after this perception he surrenders his separative existence by transcending the duality of good and bad.

The ego changes the house of identification with evil for the house of identification with good because the latter gives him a greater sense of expansion. Sooner or later the aspirant perceives the new abode to be no less of a limitation. Then he finds that the process of breaking through it is less difficult than the process of breaking through the former abode of identification with the evil. The difficulty concerning the abode of evil is is not so much of perceiving that it is a limitation but in actually dismantling it after arriving at such perception. The difficulty concerning the abode of the good is not so much in dismantling it as of perceiving that it is, in fact, a limitation. This difference arises because the animal sanskaras are more firmly rooted owing to their ancient origin and long term of accumulation. It is important to note that the good binds as much as the evil, though the binding of the good can be more easily undone after it is perceived as being a limitation.

The ego lives either through bad sanskaras or through good sanskaras, or through a mixture of good and bad sanskaras. Therefore the emancipation of consciousness from all sanskaras can come either through the good sanskaras balancing and overlapping bad sanskaras; or, through some good sanskaras balancing and overlapping bad sanskaras, and some bad sanskaras balancing and overlapping good sanskaras. If a dish is filthy you may cleanse it by covering it with soap and washing it with water. This is like good sanskaras overlapping bad sanskaras. Now if the dish is full of grease, one way of getting rid of the grease is to cover it with dust and then wash it with water. Dust is the most greaseless thing in the world and, in a sense, the opposite of grease, so that when dust is applied to the dish tainted with grease it is easy to cleanse it. This is like bad sanskaras overlapping good sanskaras. When there is exact balancing and overlapping of good and bad sanskaras, they both disappear, with the result that what remains is a clean slate of mind on which nothing is written, and which therefore reflects the Truth as it is without perversion. Realisation free from sanskaras and beyond good and bad. Nothing is ever written on the soul. The sanskaras are deposited on the mind and not on the soul. The soul always remains untarnished, but it is only when the mind is a clean mirror that it can reflect the Truth. When the impressions of good and bad both disappear the mind sees the soul. This is Illumination. The mind seeing the soul, however, is not the same as the soul knowing itself, for the soul is not the mind, but God, Who is beyond the mind. Therefore, even after the mind has seen the soul, it has to be merged in the soul if the soul is to know itself in Truth. This is Realisation. In this state the mind itself with all its good and bad sanskaras has disappeared. It is a state beyond mind, and therefore it is also beyond the distinction of good and bad. From the point of view of this state there is only one indivisible existence characterised by infinite love, peace, bliss and knowledge. The perpetual strife between good and evil has disappeared because there is neither good nor evil, only one inclusive and undivided life of God.

Parvardigar

Meher Baba
O Parvardigar! The Preserver and Protector of All.

You are without beginning and without end.

Non-dual, beyond comparison,

and none can measure You.

You are without color, without expression,

without form and without attributes.

You are unlimited and unfathomable;

beyond imagination and conception;

eternal and imperishable.

You are indivisible;

and none can see you but with eyes divine.

You always were, You always are,

and You always will be.

You are everywhere, You are in everything, and

You are also beyond everywhere and beyond everything.

You are in the firmament and in the depths,

You are manifest and unmanifest;

on all planes and beyond all planes.

You are in the three worlds,

and also beyond the three worlds.

You are imperceptible and independent.

You are the Creator, the Lord of Lords,

the Knower of all minds and hearts.

You are Omnipotent and Omnipresent.

You are Knowledge Infinite, Power Infinite and Bliss Infinite.

You are the Ocean of Knowledge,

All-knowing, Infinitely knowing;

the Knower of the past, the present and the future,

and You are Knowledge Itself.

You are all-merciful and eternally benevolent.

You are the Soul of souls; the One with infinite attributes.

You are the Trinity of Truth, Knowledge and Bliss.

You are the Source of Truth, the Ocean of Love.

You are the Ancient One, the Highest of the High.

You are Prabhu and Parameshwar;

You are the Beyond God and the Beyond-Beyond God also;

You are Parabrahma; Paramatma; Allah; Elahi; Yezdan;

Ahuramazda; God Almighty, and God the Beloved.

You are named Ezad, the Only One Worthy of Worship.

Action and Inaction

This is an excerpt from Action and Inaction
Discourses by Meher Baba

All life is an effort to attain freedom from self-created entanglement. It is a desperate struggle to undo what has been done under ignorance, to throw away the accumulated burden of the past, to find rescue from the debris left by a series of temporary achievements and failures. Life seeks to unwind the limiting sanskaras of the past and to obtain release from the mazes of its own making, so that its further creations may spring directly from the heart of eternity and bear the stamp of unhampered freedom and intrinsic richness of being which knows no limitation.

"Beloved" Prayer

Meher Baba

Beloved God,
Help us all to love you more and more...
And more and more...
And still yet more,
Till we become worthy of union with You.
And help us all to hold fast to Baba's damaan
Until the very end.