WHAT IS A BABA LOVER?

 
When one first picks up a book about Meher Baba and reads about Him, he is a Meher Baba reader, not a Meher Baba lover. If he attends meetings and listens to talks about Meher Baba, he's become a Meher Baba listener. Or course, if one leaves the meetings and attends other kinds of meetings — cults and such — then he's a Baba-shopper.

He's like the butterfly that hasn't selected the kind of flower from which it wants to get its perfume. If one comes to a lot of meetings and begins to get a little feeling about Baba, he becomes a Meher Baba candidate. When this feeling swells he may be deemed a Meher Baba enthusiast — but he's not a lover yet by any means.

After he's disposed of the preliminaries connected with the acceptance of Meher Baba as God in human form and as his only Beloved, he begins his approach towards the spiritual path. As he obediently applies Meher Baba's rules for right living, and feels himself drawing closer and closer to Meher Baba as the Only One who is assuredly his Real Beloved, countenancing none other, Meher Baba becomes the sole Reality of his life. As his closeness to the Beloved is more deeply experienced, his feeling of separation becomes more acute, longing intensifies, and yearning to bridge the gulf of separation becomes sharper and more poignant.

Only when we feel a continuous burning in remembrance of our Beloved, a desperate separation, a deep and tortured longing — because this Meher Baba is someone we want Union with, because this Meher Baba has really become our One and Only True Beloved — do we begin to take on the responsibilities and obligations of a real lover.

Everything in illusion is lessened and reduced to its irreducible minimum in our consideration and concern. There’s only one paramount interest, one transcendent yearning — Union with this Divine Beloved.

To please this Beloved and to do His Will everlastingly, we execute selfless service to our fellow man, to all living creatures in need of understanding and assistance. In every one of these beings we see this Meher Baba, because this Meher Baba lives in every being as Soul.

We feel that He is everywhere and in everyone and forgetting ourselves by remembering Him, we want to serve this One who is in everyone and everything. We feel this love can never be satiated; we can't stop serving, we can't stop giving. When we've stopped asking — when we've stopped asking others to shoulder our burdens for us, but instead, we shoulder our own burdens — that's pleasing our Beloved Meher Baba. When we actively seek to engender happiness in others we are pleasing our Real Beloved.