REUNION WITH GOD?

 
Question: If mankind believes that man is separated from God (is it a problem?) and the purpose of life is to attain reunion with God, how should one go about? It sounds too philosophical and I wonder if there is a training for this (Please do not suggest Yoga, meditation, est or any other mumbo-jumbo. I have already gone through all these gymnastics).

Answer: The purpose of life is variously described by the great Messengers, and the Avatar himself says at one time that it is this, and at another time that. But apparently all of these are descriptions of different facets of the same reality. To describe an apple as a small rounded object is quite correct. To describe it as a collection of sweet watery cells enveloped by a relatively tough skin is also valid. It can also variously be described as red, or yellow, or green, and slightly slippery, and sweetly scented, and all refer to the same object.

Indeed, the individual human being inevitably rediscovers God as the reality, but at the same instant he also does a seemingly endless number of additional things such as realizing infinite love, infinite knowledge, power and wisdom, the indivisibility of infinitude, and so on and on. All of these can be described as the purpose of life without there being the slightest accuracy of contradiction, as all are inherent in what is realized.

In his God Speaks, Meher Baba gives us an extraordinarily precise, detailed description of God in creation, the essential start of which we tend either to skip over or unconsciously reject. He describes the original state of God as totally unconscious, but innate within God the potentiality for the Whim to know His divinity consciously.

It is difficult for us to conceive all-knowing God as totally unconscious, in fact such a statement seems to describe exactly the reverse of divinity. However, anyone involved in a real learning process knows how often one has to neutralize all of one's instincts to feel, and be prepared to entertain for just a little while a challengingly different hypothesis.

So let us be prepared to focus sincerely on the possibility that the original (beyond-the-beyond) state of God was one of total unconsciousness of His Godhood. Then Meher Baba talks about the stirring of the innate Whim within God to know consciously His own Godhood. Out of the moving of the Whim all of creation emerges, and Baba describes how apparently separated droplets of the reality of God become involved in the experiencing of the creation stirred up by the Whim. However, innumerable times Meher Baba warns us that all this is apparently, and should not be mistaken for in reality.

One further essential key. In this apparent separation, motion interaction, consciousness is developed (not created, but developed, just as a photograph is in a chemical bath, for even consciousness was innately in the infinitude of God but in an undeveloped state), thus bringing into an active state the end purpose of the Whim. However, there is a gap still. Consciousness, as it slowly develops, focusses on the apparent separateness (bodies), motion, interaction and calls all this reality. If there is a tragedy in creation, it is this mistaking by consciousness of the apparent for the real, and failing totally to discern Godhead with its capabilities. No doubt the total mechanism of the development and perfecting of consciousness of Godhood is perfection itself, but to a poor human being caught up in trying to unravel the results of this original misidentification of the apparent as the real, the process is indeed tediously trying and can be occasionally downright disastrous.

As human experience spins along and results are remembered and collated by the ego which administers the computer system of the mental body, discrepancies between expectancies and actual results are noted. Eventually the ego is caught in the impasse of recognizing the disastrous results of its vigorous actions. Finally it is driven to entertain the unthinkable hypothesis that reality is not bodies, separateness, motion, interaction. Somewhere it encounters the heresy that, in fact, reality is oneness, spirit, infinite indivisible eternity. Then there can be no turning back for any return can only be to the old values based on separateness which have already been rejected as insufficient.

When the last habit pattern and its compulsions based on the mistaken concept of separate materiality has been finally worn out and discarded, Meher Baba says the drop-soul goes through a mighty leap to realize itself as god, which it always was. The reunion is no more than a change of the focus of consciousness. In fact there never was any separation, no voyage, nothing to be reunited. The whole dream adventure of creation was no more than the development of the potential for consciousness so that God should know consciously His own divinity.

Not so fast, though. Granting all this may be so, the part of the question on how to help the process along still stands. What can I do, once I have seriously entertained the possibility of some kind of return to God? Meher Baba gives a simple answer: love. This he terms the highroad of all roads to the inner goal. Further, he says that during and for some while after the lifetime of the Avatar, the highroad of love is pre-eminently available to the aspirant. Later, as the force of the manifestation of the Avatar begins to wane, so does ready access to this highroad, and the aspirant must increasingly utilize secondary roads such as meditation, chants, prayers and so on. As for development of occult powers, he warns that occult experience is not spiritual development and can be a powerfully subtle side-track from the true path.

Love! But what about it? Millions of people search every day for it and few find it. Then how can one utilize it as the highroad to truth? Meher Baba clarifies that true love (and one must assume that this is the only love that can have spiritual significance) is a gift of grace from the Master, and to receive it the aspirant must merit and win it. How this is done is an exciting story in itself which can be mined out in meticulous detail from the Discourses which Meher Baba himself gave out.