Meher Baba

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

God alone is real: featureless infinite and Beloved who incarnates

Both personal and impersonalStated explicitly

In God Speaks Meher Baba describes God in the ‘Beyond-Beyond’ state as infinite existence, knowledge and bliss, unconscious of itself, and explains creation as that God’s original whim to know himself: the question ‘Who am I?’ sets the evolution of consciousness in motion. This Absolute has no features, yet it is not merely impersonal: God is also the Beloved who is loved, and Meher Baba presented himself as the Avatar, God become man in every age. In the Discourses he insists that God alone is real and all else is illusion. The divine thus has an infinite ground and a human face, and the path is to love that face until one discovers that one is oneself God.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

The soul is God, and its long journey ends in discovering it

The Self is the AbsoluteStated explicitly

In God Speaks Meher Baba holds that the soul (atma) is in reality identical with the Oversoul (Paramatma): it is infinite and eternal but does not know it. To know it, it undertakes a journey he describes in detail: the evolution of consciousness through ever more complex forms, from stone to human being; reincarnation in millions of human forms; and involution through the inner planes up to realisation. What prevents the soul from knowing itself are sanskaras, impressions that bind consciousness to illusion. When they are exhausted, false individuality vanishes and the soul discovers that it was always God. The ego, for Meher Baba, is the last obstacle, and renouncing it is the only renunciation needed.

Why do we suffer?

Sanskaras bind consciousness; suffering wears them away

Karma and the soul's learningStated explicitly

Meher Baba explains suffering through sanskaras, the impressions each experience leaves in the mind that drive new actions and new births. These impressions, accumulated through evolution and reincarnation, bind consciousness to illusion and feed the ego. In the Discourses he describes how karma operates from one life to the next and how pain, like pleasure, is the expression of sanskaras being spent. Suffering thus has no value in itself, but it is part of the process that ultimately frees the soul, especially if accepted with love and without rebellion. What truly dissolves it is love for God, which consumes impressions like fire.

What happens after death?

After death, states of heaven and hell and a new incarnation

Rebirth according to karmaStated explicitly

In the Discourses and God Speaks Meher Baba sets out a detailed theory of reincarnation. After death the soul keeps its sanskaras in the subtle and mental bodies and passes through states of heaven or hell, which are not places but states of consciousness in which good and bad impressions are lived intensely. When that phase is exhausted it incarnates again in a human body, alternating between male and female lives, in different places and conditions, as its impressions require. The cycle continues until the soul begins involution and attains God-realisation. For Meher Baba death is as ordinary as sleep, and as illusory as everything that is not God.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

Love God and surrender to the Master: renounce only the self

Through devotion and surrenderStated explicitly

Meher Baba describes several paths in the Discourses, but considers love for God the most direct and surrender to a Perfect Master or to the Avatar the most effective. The ego cannot eliminate itself: it needs an object of love greater than itself. That is why he asked his followers to make him their constant companion and think of him more than of themselves. One of his best-known sayings sums up the demand: one need renounce nothing but one’s own self, which is simple yet almost impossible. He rejected shortcuts: he wrote against the use of drugs in search of spiritual experiences. Liberation, for him, is the realisation that one is God.

Is a teacher necessary?

The Perfect Master and the Avatar awaken what the soul cannot alone

IndispensableStated explicitly

Meher Baba gives the Perfect Masters and the Avatar a decisive role. In God Speaks and the Discourses he explains that in every age there are five Perfect Masters who direct the world’s spiritual affairs, and that the Avatar, God become man, descends periodically to give humanity a new impulse. The soul cannot cross the inner planes alone without getting lost in their powers and visions; it needs the grace and guidance of a realised master. He himself asked his followers to love and obey him and to make him their constant companion. At the same time he refused to found a religion and said he had come to awaken, not to teach.

Is the world real?

The universe is the Illusion that sustains Reality

Appearance over the one realityStated explicitly

Meher Baba dedicated God Speaks to the universe with a paradoxical formula: ‘the Illusion that sustains Reality’. Creation, he explains, arises from God’s whim to know himself; for that, consciousness passes through forms, worlds and planes that have no existence of their own, like images in a dream. Only God is real, and the universe is a nothing that seems to be something. But that illusion is not useless: it is the means by which the soul gains consciousness of itself and finally discovers that it is God. In The Everything and the Nothing he develops the idea that the Nothing (illusion) is the shadow of the Everything (God). The world is lived seriously but not taken for the ultimate.

What is love?

Love cannot be imposed: only love awakens love

Longing and unionStated explicitly

For Meher Baba love is the central force of the spiritual life. In the Discourses he describes it as the reflection of God’s unity in the world of duality: every being seeks, more or less consciously, union with what it loves, and at bottom what it seeks is God. He distinguishes human love, mixed with desire, from divine love, which asks for nothing and culminates in union with the Beloved. One of his recorded sayings states its nature: love and coercion can never go together, and though love cannot be forced on anyone, it can be awakened through love itself. That is why his teaching comes down to loving God.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

Sanskaras push, but each present act can unbind them

Karma and choiceInferred from their doctrine

In the Discourses Meher Baba describes a strongly conditioned human life: accumulated impressions (sanskaras) largely determine the desires, circumstances and even the place and sex of each incarnation, and karma operates from one life to the next with strict logic. But he is no fatalist: human beings can act so as not to create new bonds, serve without selfishness, accept what comes with love and surrender to a master, and so hasten the exhaustion of impressions. At the same time he recalls that from the standpoint of Reality all this belongs to illusion: only God is, and his will is in everything. Full freedom comes with realisation.

Why meditate or pray?

Make the Beloved a constant companion

Friendship with GodStated explicitly

Meher Baba devoted several chapters of the Discourses to meditation: he describes it as the path the mind cuts for itself through its own illusions and distinguishes many forms, from meditation on ideas or on the master’s form to objectless meditation. But his main recommendation was simpler: to remember and love him, make him a constant companion and think of him more than of oneself. The prayer he composed, the Master’s Prayer, praises God by many names, and another, the Prayer of Repentance, asks forgiveness for faults. Praying and meditating serve, for him, to direct towards God the energy that the ego scatters, until love replaces thought.

Can reason know the ultimate?

He came not to teach but to awaken: the mind must be annihilated

The ultimate lies beyond the mindStated explicitly

Meher Baba wrote works of great doctrinal complexity, such as God Speaks, with detailed maps of planes and states of consciousness. But he insisted that such knowledge does not free: in one of his recorded sayings he states that he has come not to teach but to awaken, and therefore lays down no precepts. Real knowledge of God requires the annihilation of the mind (manonash), because the mind, however subtle, still belongs to illusion. He kept outward silence for more than forty years, which he himself explained as a service to the world, not a spiritual exercise. Reason can describe the path, but the ultimate is known only when the reasoning mind ceases.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

Renounce not the world but the self, serving selflessly

Contemplation in actionStated explicitly

Meher Baba did not ask his followers to withdraw from the world: one of his recorded sayings states that one need renounce nothing but one’s own self. In the Discourses he describes the ideal life as a life in the world, active and detached, in which selfless service is a form of worship. He himself founded schools, a hospital and a shelter at Meherabad, and spent years caring for the masts, people absorbed in ecstatic states whom he considered advanced souls. At the same time he alternated periods of seclusion, fasting and silence, and in 1949 undertook with a few companions the New Life, a phase of voluntary wandering and helplessness.