THE HUMAN SIGHT OF GOD — TO MEHERA

 
In my paintings of Meher, pigment in and of its very substance, becomes by His Grace the alive image of His actual Love manifested as Art.

Art, as you know, was meant for the glorification of God-Man. But art, as was inevitable, gradually became entangled in illusion, and the artist fell under its hypnotic spell. And when he fell, all of the beautiful elements of painting fell apart, and chaos ruled painting.

I came to Baba, looking neither to one side nor the other but straight into His eyes. And He sent me back straightway into the world of painting to gather up the scattered elements of painting and bring them to Him, so that He could remake them into an art of His own liking, an art forged in the fire of His Love on the anvil of His Truth.

Painting is made from the interpenetration of light, color and form. But when painting loses its hold on the Personal God as Avatar, it loses its power of expression and so falls into confusion and aimlessness.

If the aim of life is to love God, then surely the aim of painting must become once again to see the Beauty of Avatar and express that Beauty through the elements of sight.

Before I knew of Meher Baba, painting was my religion; I knew no other. On that blessed day when Baba sent that long gaze into my eyes, He made Himself the substance of my religion. That was the day when the painter and the artist met. Baba is the only Artist, and when we left His presence, the Artist said, "I am always with you."

What does it mean to make a painting of the God-Man? Perhaps I had come to India to find out what this means. Baba is saying, "Look, look! I am man; I have become a man!" That is what painting Baba means. The Divine can never be seen fully except in a man. The Divine is fully manifest only in a man — nowhere else.

What did I discover by going to India? I understood what Baba meant when He said, "I am either an ordinary man or I am the Highest of the High, but I am nothing in between."

It means that God stooped down to become an ordinary man. Baba was in the truest sense an ordinary man. So profoundly ordinary was He in His human form that He created all around Him marvelous and amazing specimens of ordinary men and women.

Only a "Perfectly" ordinary man can create a truly ordinary person. A truly ordinary person is one who gives no importance to himself and all importance to the Divine Beloved.

Such an ordinary person is the most extraordinary that can be found!

Mandali are those rare ones, ordinary people reduced to the natural state of being just human and nothing more. Just to go and touch these ordinary ones is in itself a holy thing.

I know that Baba wants me to think of Him and hold on to Him as being completely human. I know this because He told me so when I was with Him in 1965. He told me when we were discussing shaving.

Baba says in God Speaks that there are always the perfect ones, and there are the most perfect ones, and there is the Supremely Perfect One which is Himself. He is the Supremely Perfect One because He is the only One who ever becomes a supremely ordinary human being.

It is this supremely ordinary human being, full of everything sweet and lovely and perfectly sublime, that we must come to know and love and give ourselves up to.

And this is what painting means, really: to see Baba stooping down to show the most extraordinary thing that ever happens when God becomes an ordinary man. What else could He have shown to the eyes of a painter but the face of a man? No artist will ever paint the face of God, except God Himself when He paints it in the state of Fana-Fillah for the eyes of the Majzoob alone when He is drowned in the Reality of the Beloved.

Before I went to India this last time, I still had some lingering hope of glimpsing some spark of the Divine which would transport me into the heights of vision. Now I have given it up. Now I am resigned to face squarely my Beloved as the One who for the sake of all has crushed Himself down into the finite and helpless form of an ordinary man.

Beloved Baba, I bow down to You in my paintings. You have brought me face to face with You, and in so doing You took away from me the art of painting and gave it back. I stand now at the delta of a mighty river that was once the great tradition of western painting flowing down through the centuries.

It is all over. Now there is only the ocean, and that ocean is Your shining face.

Alas, it is all too vast. How secure the raging stream by comparison to that Ocean! Before these eyes spreads the shorelessness of Your Face, and my task is Oceanic.