Conversations about Meher Baba

Sahavas for Everyone, third Thursday of the month.Avatar Meher Baba is in each one of us. And His Love is the focus of this gathering. Open discussion with each session having a topic or theme. Special Guest: The Avatar and the Five Perfect MastersVanessa and Laurent will discuss the advents of the Avatar and the five perfect masters for each Avatar based on beloved Baba's explanations. We have a special surprise show and tell. Jai Baba!Hosted by Laurent Weichberger in SC. This event was recorded live. To be first to be notified of a new video on this channel, please hit the red subscribe button, then the notifications bell. To join future live events, see www.babazoom.net. Please join our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/meherbabafamily

The Journey of Consciousness Culminating in Divine Love The spiritual journey of consciousness, lovingly guided personally by Baba, proceeds through lifetimes from the head down to the heart, and from the heart ultimately into the soul, the “realm of the spirit” as Darwin refers to it. The base of operations for most people is located in the head, the mind, the realm of thoughts, beliefs and theories. Life is seen through the lens of right and wrong, good and bad, spiritual and unspiritual, loving and not so loving. Sooner or later, we become painfully aware of our cramped and limited mental world of time and space as well as the frustrating tension of the opposites. We’ve habitually turned to the mind to tell us what to do and what is important in life, and we find ourselves harassed by thoughts all day long. Eventually, Baba brings home to us the limitations of seeing and reacting to life through the narrow lens of the mind, and coaxes our inner awareness down to the realm of the heart, inspired by His love. Unfortunately, much of this awakening comes through experiences of heartbreak and disappointment. Nevertheless, we gradually find ourselves in a much more expansive place. We are in the realm of emotions, desires, and the deeper feelings, initially a cauldron of powerful forces and impulses that are overwhelmingly difficult to control. Yet compared to the mind, which one might think of as three-dimensional, our base of operations in the heart is multi-dimensional. As the Sufi poet, Hafiz, once wrote, “The mind cannot occupy the throne in the palace of the heart. It can only be its doorkeeper.” In the heart, there is more substance, it is more spacious, and we enjoy flashes of timelessness and, as Baba has said, “fleeting moments of union with God.” Intuition begins to replace the mind as the arbiter of what we do. In one part of the heart, the superficial layer, resides the negative emotions such as anger, jealousy, greed, envy, fear, resentment, sadness, and hurt. And there are also deep-rooted desires and multifarious wants. In all of these, we feel a narrowing down of life. We feel small. Now begins our inner work, and it requires tremendous tolerance to remain consciously in the heart and not continually retreat up into the mind. As Rumi says, we become “a wound without a shield.” But with our persistent and painstaking efforts, Baba begins to transmute these lower selfish reactions to life into loving responses, the divine qualities such as: anger into patience, greed into generosity, desires into purity, resentment into forgiveness, entitlement into gratitude, self-centeredness into empathy and compassion. After many years of inner focus, however, we are astounded to find that even the heart itself is too small! The heart, in its greatest depths, has this profound limitation: it divides life into me and other, me and nature, me and Baba—it splits creation into two. In the mind, the soul is stuck living in a veritable shack. In the heart, it lives in a great mansion, spacious and with windows that can look out on the timelessness of life. But eventually the soul can no longer breathe in this limited, divided space of the heart. It feels suffocated, and longs for oneness. This is when Baba, who provides all the necessary inspiration, begins to draw our consciousness directly into the soul itself. If living at the level of the heart is compared to residing on the rugged terrain of the earth, rising to the level of the soul is like viewing the earth from above, from a transcendent place of oneness, in a most loving place within that still maintains its compassionate participation in the ups and downs of life. The soul has an intimate view of our heart interacting with others and the world. It experiences life as a glorious loving whole; it dissolves our separateness into a supreme completeness. As Rumi, the great Sufi mystic once said, “If the door of your soul were to open for an instant, you would see that the heart of every existent thing is your intimate friend.” At first, as Baba has said, our experiences of the soul are fleeting, a brief and yet sometimes overwhelming experience. As years goes on, we are able to spend more and more time in the soul where we merge for longer periods with Baba and experience His magnificent sweet love. We begin, as Darwin has said, to change our address from the heart to the soul, from living in a mansion, so to speak, to being in the boundless expanse of all creation. From the world of form and space, we dissolve in what Rumi calls “the spaceless.” From living in the world divided into myriad forms, we inherit a glorious unified vision. At last, we fall back into Baba’s loving all-embracing arms, whole and complete.Rumi says it beautifully,“The roads are different, but the destination is one. All those who yelled at each other along the way, ‘You hypocrite! You infidel!’ in the end, drink from the same keg of wine and laugh out loud!”

Irwin Luck's Story: Meher Baba's Internment and the Great Darshan in 1969Irwin Luck was one of the fortunate few westerners to be present at Meher Baba's Internment in the Samadhi on February 7, 1969. Along with others, Irwin had the honor of putting handfulls of earth on Baba's burial box before it was covered. He continued to stay in India along with his brother Eddie until the Darshan began in April. He will tell his remarkable story this morning.Hosted by Betty Lowman in CAThis event was recorded live. To be first to be notified of a new video on this channel, please hit the red subscribe button, then the notifications bell. To join future live events, see www.babazoom.net. Please join our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/meherbabafamily

Dear folks of Baba, Baba has said that His grace “is flowing sufficiently all the time to fill one and all receptacles everywhere,” but “there is rarely a vessel which is not filled with other things. A vessel must first be emptied before it can be filled by the flow of my grace. It is also my grace which helps a vessel to become completely emptied in the first place.” And He added, “The flow of my grace to you depends upon the intensity of your love, for it is love which attracts my grace to you.” In the meetings at the home of Darwin and Jeanne Shaw in the early 1970s, Darwin emphasized emptying out the heart of what Baba called “strangers” to make room for Him and His grace to live in us. Prior to meeting the Shaws, from time to time it was my practice to share my mental and emotional struggles with Baba, but only when they would come up and were too overwhelming for me. In his usual unassuming way, Darwin would recommend to those of us who were new to Baba to be proactive in giving our interior to Him. Darwin would say, “The deeper the feeling, the deeper the healing.” So, with his encouragement, I began proactively to dredge up my emotional complexes and mental conflicts within and imagine them flowing energetically to Baba before me. I became obsessed with emptying “the vessel” -- the heart. In the process, I felt His intimate companionship working with me in my efforts. I experienced that Baba was actually precipitating this inner work, and with this came some measure of His grace flowing into me. Not overnight but after decades, the emotions, desires and feelings in me were gradually being replaced by the divine qualities of “truth, love, purity and beauty” (and all the variations of these qualities such as empathy, forgiveness, humor, patience and kindness). Basically, this is a major way Baba enters our lives and eventually, as the mandali expressed it, “He takes over” -- often very subtly and unostentatiously, so as to avoid awakening the ego! I find that Baba lovers all have their own unique versions of this work and companionship in their lives with Him. It culminates after many years, even lifetimes, in a gradual merging of oneself with Baba, with others and all of life. In Darwin’s experience, it resulted eventually in what he described as “living in and through everyone and everything.” This is the experience that he once privately shared with me. I’m reminded of something Rumi once wrote, “If the door of your Soul were to open for an instant, you would see that the heart of every existent thing is your intimate friend.” To my way of thinking, Eruch described the culmination of the path of self-effacement in Baba in these words, “There has been no Eruch for years. Through His grace, I have become the perfect witness.” This, I feel, is where we are all ultimately heading with Baba. As we go on emptying ourselves, a point is reached where it becomes Baba, our deepest love within, who lives what was formerly our life, and we witness this from a place of pure awareness. I am always disposed to favor simplicity when I think of how Baba and His Grace manifest in my life—it is His One Love flowing into me and into this world. If His love flowing into my life moves me to make efforts to be more loving, I call it His inspiration. If His love flowing into my life helps me in making the difficult decisions in my life, I call it His guidance. If it flows into my heart’s longing for closeness, I call it His companionship. If it flows into my life causing me to expand in being, I call it His unlimitedness. If it flows into my restless spirit causing me to move toward peace and harmony, I call it His Being. If it flows into my depleted body and mind, awakening my vitality and lifting my spirits, I call it His power. If it flows into my depressed and despairing heart, the dark periods of my life, I call it His light. If it flows into me, causing me to make an extra effort to express love beyond my normal capacity, I call it His grace. Yet to me, it is all His same never-failing love flowing into me, and it only seems different depending on which situation in my life it manifests. If I were to choose an expression to encompass all the above manifestations of Baba in my life, I would simply call it His Divine Grace. What is Baba’s grace for you and how do you experience it in your life? It is not by chance that the word grace and gratitude both come from the same root. Gratitude is our human response to Divine Grace. Have you found that the feeling of gratefulness has deepened over the years in your life with Baba? In His love, JeffWe are continuing on page 113.This event was recorded live. To be first to be notified of a new video on this channel, please hit the red subscribe button, then the notifications bell. To join future live events, see www.babazoom.net. Please join our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/meherbabafamily

Dear folks of Baba,Sometimes when I would be with Darwin, he would make surprisingly fundamental observations about the Baba community, not critical but insightful, and I would take special note. On one occasion, he happened to say, very casually, that the Baba lovers don’t seem to be content in themselves and with the world around them. He would say, “Be content with what you have and are…Be satisfied with His companionship.” This led me to ponder how poised and relaxed Darwin always seemed, whatever the outer circumstances. He appeared to be comfortable with “What Is.” Years later, when I was faced with a great conflict that I had been suffering with for a long time, I remembered Darwin’s words. At one point during this period, I happened to read a message of Baba’s that I had read many times over the years, and I saw it in an entirely different light. In His discourse on “Will and Worry”, Baba says, “When the intensity of your faith in My will reaches its height, you say goodbye to worry forever. Then all that you have suffered and enjoyed in the past, together with what you may experience in the future, will be to you the most loving and spontaneous expression of My will.” Like a bolt of lightning, it was absolutely clear in that moment that I definitely did not realize that everything which happens to me is “the most loving and spontaneous expression of His will!” I was lucky if I felt ten percent of what happened to me as loving and spontaneous.As it happens to us from time to time in our life with Baba, the shock of His words now meant that I had to recalibrate; I had to do a radical wholesale re-evaluation of a massive part of my life with Him. At first, rather than being critical of what was happening to me and around me, I determined to at least start with accepting “what is.” I had to stop judging what was happening and be open to it as being “a most loving and spontaneous expression” of Baba’s will. Even though my emotions and feelings might be hurt by others and by life at the lower level, inwardly at a higher level I began asserting that all this is His love. Although this was not my experience, my consciousness began probing deeply into what was happening before me, with its oftentimes negativity and harshness. I contemplated the state that Darwin must have arrived at to be so accepting of life. It was during this same time that a book came into my hands, the autobiography of Roshi Kennett, the first female Zen priest in Japan. She was British, and it was shortly after World War II when there was still great animosity felt by the Japanese toward the British. As a result, she suffered enormous persecution by the establishment of the Zen monastery, which drove her eventually to find a place within her that was unassailable to persecution. She writes of that inner achievement: “The only thing I can possibly do in order to learn anything is to accept, with unswerving faith, everything that is happening to me, believing that it is all for my good, whatever it may be. If I respond in any other way, then I shall always be saying that this person is good or that one is bad…I must see what they do as being intrinsically good at all times, even when it works against me.” Her words were an immense challenge to me. Of course, I realized that she didn’t mean that we have to martyr ourselves and tolerate abuse if we can avoid it. Some believe that God is even punishing them, but Eruch would share this metaphor: Baba is a statue (and by extension our own soul), and if we hit the statue, we can’t say that the statue is hurting us; we are hurting ourselves.Baba helped in this overall re-evaluation process. He brought home to me one day that to be critical of others is to judge the work He is doing in each one. If He could awaken more love in someone without forcing it on them, He would already have succeeded. But, as He has said, love cannot be coerced, and even He has to submit to His own law of love. I felt compassion for the Compassionate One and His unfailing efforts to awaken us to love. In recent years, Mehera, Baba’s Beloved, brought home indelibly to me in a moment a most extraordinary truth—it is all pure love! That is, there is really no such thing as gradations of love. Here is what Baba and observing the mandali eventually brought me to after many years. I found that it is essential that I say yes to “what is” in the moment, which keeps me fully open to what is happening, and then afterwards to consult my heart: What is it prompting me to do in response? I feel more clearly than ever that it is really my Beloved who is playing all these parts for everyone’s awakening and ultimate good. In His love, Jeff

Paige HetheringtonSahavas for Everyone, third Thursday of the month.Avatar Meher Baba is in each one of us. And His Love is the focus of this gathering. Open discussion with each session having a topic or theme. Hosted by Laurent Weichberger in SC. Jai Baba!This event was recorded live. To be first to be notified of a new video on this channel, please hit the red subscribe button, then the notifications bell. To join future live events, see www.babazoom.net. Please join our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/meherbabafamily

Dear folks of Baba, My computer is still being repaired and so I am handicapped in what I can do as far as writing goes. For this reason, I am sending out an exchange I witnessed years ago of a woman who was saying goodbye to Mehera at Meherazad. It was one of those pivotal moments for me in my inner life with Baba in what it conveyed about moods and detachment. Such priceless moments naturally occurred around Baba’s mandali without their necessarily knowing their profound impact. I hope you find it helpful as it was for me. LOVE MUST BE SOMETHING DIFFERENTI found that I absorbed in a very natural way many profound truths in being with the mandali. Here is one example. One deep insight came in a way that on the surface wouldn’t be obvious at all, and this happened one day at Meherazad with Baba’s Beloved Mehera. It was back in the early 1970s when I was young and immature in Baba. Mehera was standing on the porch of the Main House, saying goodbye to a young woman whose pilgrimage had come to an end; she was on her way back to the West. I was there just to say goodbye for the day before going back to Meherabad. Mehera lovingly encouraged the young woman to take Baba with her, not to worry, that Baba would take care of her, and at one point she surprised me, saying, “Sometimes we feel empty and depressed, but we know Baba wants us to be cheerful, so we make efforts to be cheerful.” This made a profound impression on me. I thought to myself, “She is the beloved of the Beloved, and for decades she has been next to the source of all Love, and yet she doesn’t always experience a joyous heart full of Baba’s love?” I concluded, "Then love must be something different from what I had thought.” For I experienced Mehera as the most loving person I had ever met, always radiating Baba’s love, and yet her experience in herself was not always of that love, but actually could be of emptiness. Up to that point, I took the feeling of Baba’s love in my heart as the sign that I was on the right track, Baba was with me; and when I would lose that feeling, I agonized over what I must have done wrong. I’d struggle to get the feeling back. Desperately. But after this small exchange with Mehera, I rarely ever worried again about how I was feeling. I never felt bad if I experienced emptiness or sunk into a low mood. I was able to see after this that love was on a different track altogether; it came from a different dimension within me. I would notice, for example, in times when I felt depressed or sad, my mood never prevented me from responding to a situation with love. Love was not dependent upon my mood or the state of my feelings. Nor did my moods take away from my love. Love was independent. And after that, I didn’t take it personally when I wasn’t experiencing Baba’s love in my heart. I would leave that up to His timing, and I would be deeply grateful when it happened. Baba once said, “Feelings and emotions are only the creation of energy and mind. Love is the creation of the soul.”Over time, I came to experience my consciousness, to use a metaphor, as the earth’s atmosphere, and moods and emotional states are like weather systems passing through it. If I identified with a raging storm in the atmosphere, I would be buffeted around by winds, but if I didn’t identify with the storm, it would pass through me much more quickly and I would not be pulled in. Years later, I began to see moods and emotional states like the seasons. It is not possible to stay in the springtime of moods like many spiritual groups advocate. Spring has to give way to summer where things heat up and a listlessness sets in. Then autumn comes and the natural world begins to shut down, the temperatures cool in a way that’s invigorating. But that doesn’t last. Winter comes, and everything dies back; there can be a feeling of emptiness and nature appears lifeless. These natural cycles are like the feelings and emotions moving naturally through us. And yet all the time, Baba’s love is behind the cycle of these emotional seasons, untouched, independent, ever accessible to us. It is like Mehera’s expansive, gentle and ever-embracing love, which she radiated so beautifully to us, even though she herself might be feeling sad and weary. How amazing that because of such a seemingly minor incident, with only a few words spoken, such a profound truth about moods and feelings was communicated, which has made such a difference in my life. But I know well, that Baba’s close mandali are completely linked to His divinity and so many deep truths naturally just flowed from them, whether they were aware of it or not. Later, I read where Baba had said to Arnavaz Dadachanji, who was complaining to Him that she wasn’t feeling Him, “I never said to feel me. I said to love me.” So true.In His love, JeffWe are continuing on page 105A link to the PDF of Effort and Grace: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xrR75eksY-tErdKZm9aOBs3omuhioasb/view?usp=sharing

Dear folks of Baba, In a recent question and answer session in the Original Kitchen, a fairly new person to the Center asked, with genuine sincerity, “What is love?” Because the question was so fundamental and deep, no one among the group was readily forthcoming with an answer. There was a pregnant pause, I called out for help to Baba within, and this is what came out: “I think most of us know what love is when it is expressed. But how to define it? It is something we feel, which is really beyond definition. We see it when someone forgives our careless mistake, when we see someone being very patient in a trying situation, when someone shares their last dollar with us, when someone holds our hand when we’ve just lost someone near and dear.” To my surprise, I realized I was describing what Baba calls the divine qualities as they are expressed in our ordinary daily life, those very human qualities that come from the love within us, naturally flowing from Baba. It is nothing that has to be acquired; love only needs to be unveiled. If we were to give a job description of how the mandali, Baba’s intimate companions, were with us, they expressed nothing that we would call esoteric or transcendent. Their love was beautifully human, so knowable: a walk with us when we were going through a very troubled period, a gift of Baba’s precious hair to keep with us always in a locket, a hot buttered bakri fresh from the oven from the kitchen at Meherazad on our birthday, a leisurely afternoon sharing funny stories from our lives, a feeling of truly belonging which we had never felt in our life before, taking a group of kids on a ride to the beach in the golf cart, which Kitty would do—all expressions of love that we all know so well. When I went to Meherabad for the first time, I thought the mandali would be these great spiritual beings having spent their whole lives with Baba, and I was so relieved to find that they were like my favorite aunts and uncles, not at all the deified disciples of the Christ that religion makes of them. Whatever self-importance they may have once possessed, Baba had eliminated. The invaluable focus of Darwin’s book is to help us remove the selfish tendencies in us that block the flow of this love that naturally longs to express itself through us. When through persistent effort our selfish ambitions, dreams and wants as well as self-doubt, guilt and unworthiness one day go, love is what remains, the love that we are in essence. We find that Baba is always there along with Mehera’s example of one-pointed love for Him to help anyone who longs to love. His mandali were embodiments of how love can be so naturally expressed in this dear world of ours. Rumi once wrote, “On the spiritual path, effort is required, but grace is a thousand times greater than effort. When the morning sun appears, the candle of self-effort can be blown out.” Eventually Baba takes over. Through effort, all the doors, windows and skylights of our house will be opened to let in the light of His precious love. Baba describes Divine love, in His words, as “a fusion of personal and impersonal love.” We are all familiar with personal love which we share with each other, although Baba says it loses much of its charm when it becomes too possessive and is not extended to everyone. Baba defines impersonal love as the things that we do as our duty such as going to work to provide for our family, maintaining the books at our office, the composing of a symphony to touch the hearts of others, picking up the litter on city streets—expressions of love that enhance the world though they are not expressed to any one person. That is, it is equally important, Baba says, that this impersonal side of life which He calls “duty”, our daily responsibilities, is infused with love. We bring Him into the countless little things we do. Otherwise, our life becomes just duty without being enlivened by love. In one of the large grocery stores in North Myrtle Beach, most of the cashiers are superficially friendly, just going through the motion of ringing up our groceries, but there is one older Hispanic lady who greets everyone warmly with a genuine interest in each of her customers. We are invariably go to her register, even if we have to wait in a long line. She is doing her “duty”, but she infuses it with kindness and love. Our impersonal duties occupy a large portion of our life, and unless we bring love into them with Baba, we will be only mechanical, just superficially engaged, and our life will be seriously deprived of much of its enthusiasm and vitality. Whether interacting with us or carrying out their worldly responsibilities, we found the mandali fully engaged in the present moment. What happens at the street level then becomes sacred. “Human love in its personal and impersonal aspects is limited; divine love with its fusion of the personal and the impersonal aspects is infinite in being and expression.” - Meher Baba In His love, Jeff

The Topic: Our Real WorkDear folks of Baba, In this chapter on Our Real Work, Darwin talks about finding what type of service we feel suited to do for Baba. A large percentage of the Baba people are in the healing and service professions, but the majority have positions in a wide range of vocations. Whatever the field, it is possible to serve Baba and participate in His work in the world. I came from a politically active family, and so when I began working at the Center, primarily on the cabin crew, I initially wondered what cleaning cabins has to do with serving the world and contributing to its spiritual upliftment. Reading the following passage from Baba’s discourses helped me understand that it doesn’t really matter what we do externally. That we dedicate our work wholeheartedly to Baba is enough. He wrote: "The unity and solidarity of the inner plane makes it possible for the Master to use his disciple as a medium for his work even when the disciple is unconscious of serving this larger purpose of the Master. This is possible because the disciple, through his love and understanding of the Master as well as his obedience and surrender, establishes a rapport with the Master and comes into tune with him. Those who come into direct contact with the Master receive his direct help, and those who are closely connected with his disciple receive the Master's indirect help. Sharing of spiritual work is by no means one-sided; even the disciples who merely think of the Master or meditate upon him have the privilege of sharing the spiritual and universal work in which the Master might be engaged at that moment. As he is one with eternity, the Master is beyond time and all limitations of time; as he is also interested in the spiritual upliftment of humanity, he assumes many of the limitations of time and his work can be helped by the voluntary co-operation of his disciples. The Master feeds upon the love of his disciples and utilizes the spiritual forces released by them for his universal work. In this way the Master is like the relaying station which receives a song only in order to broadcast it to the world at large. To love the Master is to love all, not merely symbolically but actually; for what the Master receives on the subtle planes he spiritualizes and distributes. Thus he not only strengthens the personal links which the disciples may have with him but also gives them the privilege of sharing his divine work." Whether we are taking Baba’s name with each stride in our morning jog, or designing our flower garden as a loving gift for Him, offering our morning and evening prayers to Him, composing a song to share with His lovers, stirring His name into the batter of the cake we're baking for someone’s birthday, bringing our kids to the Center in Myrtle Beach so they can be in His loving atmosphere, attending wholeheartedly to all the small details involved in our office job—in countless ways we can bring our day in tune with Baba’s loving presence, knowing that He is always pleased with anything we do for Him. In fact, He has said, “Whatever you do for Me is done by Me." Even when circumstances don’t allow for the outer expression of love, we can always emanate Baba’s love from within. In all that we do, as He says, we can allow Him to work through us for the "spiritual upliftment of the world," even if we are not aware of it. Is it really necessary to be aware of this higher purpose? Whatever our outer work, our inner effort is best focused on and occupied with expressing in the world the divine qualities of “truth, love, purity and beauty.” As Darwin says, “We open up to the Master within and invite His divine impressions to filter in through our heart center.” They are “there already, resident in the heart” and only need to be awakened. In our efforts with Baba, our personality, rather than being a base of operations, is gradually transmuted into being a vehicle for His love. Darwin says, “We are heading for a life of service, and on the spiritual path, each of us has a duty to perform. Everyone who comes to Baba is put to work.” How will we serve Baba? “Golden opportunities for service to Meher Baba will come up,” Darwin assured us. “Even just loving Baba is a great service, because that love is going out, affecting the environment and counteracting at least some of the negative forces that are out there…Baba would often have people as useful tools—avenues or channels—for His work. They did not necessarily know what was happening; they were just being themselves. “ “Serving the Master is a joy for the disciple, even when it means an ordeal that tries his body or mind.” Meher BabaIn His love, Jeff We are continuing on page 100.A link to the PDF of Effort and Grace: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xrR75eksY-tErdKZm9aOBs3omuhioasb/view?usp=sharing