Late Night Chat with Jeff: Loving Others, Loving Baba, Aug 25, 2024, live on Baba Zoom

We have some informal chat after every arti, the "post-arti party"! But once a week, Jeff Wolverton joins us for some serious mining of the spiritual depths. Join us for conversation, more readings, songs, quotes - you never know what treasures will be uncovered!

Topic: Loving Others, Loving Baba

Dear Folks of Baba,

In my early years with Baba, I found it difficult in the moment to know how much I should focus on Baba within and how much I should focus on others. As long as I was tuning into Baba’s presence, I felt comfortable, but when I was relating to others, was I really simultaneously focusing on Baba? That is, was I able to relate to Baba in others or was I just relating to them as others independent of Baba? This deep questioning within myself led me to a decades-long effort to find Baba in others, or in another way of approaching this which worked best for me: to see others as Baba in disguise. I remember one day Eruch bringing out this quote by Baba in Mandali Hall:

To love Me is to love all.

To love Me in all is also to love Me.

To love all is not to love Me.

This was a challenge to my way of thinking. I realized that I was going to have to ponder the whole question of loving others: to harmonize my love for Baba with my love for others so that my love for others didn’t take me away from Baba. The mandali, I could see, seemed to have found a way of expressing this harmony of loving Baba and others naturally and effortlessly.

This search was helped further for me by something Dan Ladinsky once shared with me. Eruch would greet us by name on the veranda of Meherazad when we arrived in the bus. We all enjoyed his embrace. But at five in the morning in Baba’s bedroom when His birthday was being celebrated by shouting out, Avatar Meher Baba seven times, Eruch would afterwards embrace each of the Western volunteers and the mandali gathered, one by one, saying, “I love you, Baba”. Was Eruch experiencing each one as Baba in disguise, his Beloved aseach one? I took this deeply to heart, and there were rare times over the years that followed when I would have this experience, so that being with Baba within and being with others would merge. The two experiences would be harmonized.

In another instructive moment, I remember when one of the Prem Ashram boys, Esfandiar Vasali, one in whom Baba awakened divine love, was here at the Center. I asked him if he was able to see Baba in others. His answer truly surprised me, “I have not yet attained to that high state.” He radiated Baba’s love so powerfully, but he was yet to experience Baba in others. He shared that when he was a teenager at Meherabad, he would wait for Baba to come to say goodnight to him and the other boys, and Baba would not come until he experienced in his heart that it was “Baba loving Baba.”

Have you dealt with this challenge of loving Baba and loving others? What methods and ways have you found to harmonize these two loves? Have you found that you can love those who are near and dear to you and love Baba at the same time without any effort? Do you encounter resistance in yourself in trying to love others with Baba’s love?

When asked what our relationship to others should be, Ramana Maharshi, according to Baba a 6th plane saint, replied, “There are no others.”

In His love, Jeff

To join the email list for Late Night Chats, contact Angela

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