ON MUSIC AND MEDITATION

 
1 October 1978

Your view about music is appreciable, and your attempt to compose music to inspire people to soar higher in thoughts is laudable. The music should have a combination of charming notes and verses which contain spiritual truths and the pangs and joys of love.

The enchantment derived from music should not end with one becoming impractical and a burden on society. However high the thoughts may soar, the feet should be on earth. This is what Meher Baba indicated regarding maintaining a balance.

Meher Baba has delineated meditation in His Discourses, but He has not specifically said one should meditate. Meditation can be useful to make a man clear in his thinking and maintain health and energy, but meditation cannot solve the problems of life.

Meditation cannot make one free from the bondage of illusion and give the experience of the "I am God" state unless it is aligned with the Avatar of the Age, Avatar Meher Baba. The Avatar is the same at all times born in different bodies under different circumstances, speaking different languages, giving messages which are apparently different but pertain to one Truth. Zoroaster, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, and Meher Baba are the same.

The difficulty with meditation to realize the Ultimate is that man is caught up in a cage of ignorance of his body, mind, and imagination. He talks about transcendental meditation. Is this about that which is beyond the mind and imagination? If it is, then it is not possible to come out of the cage and gain the freedom of the beyond-the-mind state through meditation.

A man sitting in a cage meditating upon freedom outside the cage calling it transcendental does not help himself to come out of the cage unaided by the Avatar. He may meditate and meditate within the cage but the freedom that he will subjectively enjoy will be within the confines of the cage. At the most he may, by sheer force of one-pointed meditation, move hither and thither in space along with himself — the cage of his body, mind, and imagination — wherever he goes. He may get a false sense of freedom but not the freedom that could be achieved by coming out of the cage.

Adi K. Irani