A PRIEST'S SEARCH FOR REALITY

 
I then [1969] wanted to become a filmmaker, a TV film producer and one of my first jobs was as an associate producer on a couple of one-hour network specials with a man named Robert Riger. He had become a highly successful sports photographer, first with Sports Illustrated and later with ABC's Wide World of Sports. At this time we were winding up a one-hour special with country-singer John Denver, called Bighorn and one day during post-production, Bob asked me in all earnestness whether I knew about Meher Baba in India, saying that he was supposed to be the return of Christ on earth.

I didn't want to laugh in his face but I think I smiled and said, "No, Bob, I don't follow those things." He went on to say how he himself wasn't a believer but that his son Chris had a tremendous conversion, in a way that totally changed his life for the good, that he had even been to India and claimed this and that about Meher Baba. I just listened politely but really wasn't much interested. As I recall it now, this was probably the first time I had heard anything directly about Meher Baba.

About a year after that I made contact with a group of people who had formed a school under the guidance of a South American philosopher, scientist and teacher named Oscar Ichazo. From early life he had been exposed to many different spiritual traditions as well as the martial arts and had formed a school called the Arica Institute. The system provides a theory about the psyche, a new method of scientific comprehension. I had never in all my years come across such sharp and precise techniques for processing one's life experiences by the application of reason rather than faith — that the path to unity is objective rather than idealistic. I did a 40-day intensive training with Arica. A few months after this training, I had an opportunity to do more advanced training which would prepare me to pass the Arica work to others.

During the training we had the opportunity of meeting with Oscar for the first time. People asked him many questions about different teachers and gurus popular in the day and for the most part he thought they were charlatans or children.

Then somebody popped up with Meher Baba's name and he responded, "Meher Baba is who he says he is. He is the Avatar of the age." My ears pricked up. I didn't know the word 'Avatar,' but it must be important, and "of the age" — must be very important. No human being I had encountered until now had so deeply impressed me as Oscar, so this remark about Meher Baba lodged in me somewhere and then I promptly forgot it....

Then in 1975 the school was suddenly disbanded temporarily and I returned to the United States, went through a bad case of hepatitis, followed by a terrible emotional and mental crisis of abandonment during which I had to fight with my consciousness to stay alive. It was like a mini dark-night lasting some months.

One day browsing dazedly through a bookstall I came across Alan Cohen's Mastery of Consciousness. I leafed through some pages and thought, hmmm, maybe some good medicine here. I felt really desperate. So I took the book home and I can remember those were days of intense interior anguish and preoccupation caused by over-attachment to a callous beloved.

But suddenly there would come moments while reading this book when I felt totally lifted out of this pain and into Meher Baba's presence. And the insight in those moments was that pain was totally illusory, and obsessive dream, and I began to get a glimmer of awakening and a sense of who Meher Baba really is. His explicit statements about his being the Awakener and his Divinity were being back up by what I felt. And there where moments when I cried and laughed at the same time at the "leela" of it all.

And so Meher Baba became a powerful refuge and I started thinking of him more and more....

Then one day at a party with Oscar Ichazo in Scarsdale I said to him, "Oscar, what's with Meher Baba? I'm swimming in Meher Baba!" and he told me this story:

In 1969 when he was given the mandate to start the School he knew that it was too much for one man to do and would need a strong group effort. He didn't want to play master or guru, and knew it was a work for humanity of vital importance. He said a wave was coming which would require humanity to jump its level of consciousness, a level where it was not necessary for the human voice to go, that people would be tuned to each other through Intuition. The School would provide the necessary tools for the great work of ego-reduction in the West and be the leaver to prepare society for the jump. He was frightened at the task but it was a mandate and he had to do it.

One of the requirements was that it had to begin in the desert of Arica in northern Chile, the driest spot in the western hemisphere. So he went there to the desert and did his ceremony of dedication. During this experience he saw a figure approaching from a long distance and quickly coming towards him. Looking into the eyes of this person he said he had never experienced such waves of love "and he dove into my heart." With that he said he felt the strength to start the School. And soon after the first group of 56 Americans arrived to spend ten months with him in the Arica desert doing the first training.

It was somebody in this group that gave him a "Don't Worry Be Happy" Baba card and immediately he recognized that it was Meher Baba whom he'd encountered in his vision in the desert. It's funny that the next two or three times I saw Oscar after that he repeated that story to me....

Finally I realized that there was no putting it off. I had to go to Meher Baba's Tomb, the final resting place of his physical body. It was already the eleventh hour and soon the wave would come. So I bought my ticket to India....