I saw the transmutation of this age magically at work, during the hour or more that I was in Meher Baba's presence, as I listened to whole phrases and sentences being transmitted through Baba's hands, and coming as articulate communication out of Eruch's mouth. I was witnessing the divine impetus for a new era of communications, the age of intuition
. Looking back at what I saw and heard that treasured morning, I realize now I was being given a kind of glimpse into a whole new realm of communications by means of this unique transmission of understanding from the Avatar's graceful hands into the spoken language of the human heart.
When Avatar Meher Baba began His Silence, in nineteen twenty-five, that was the beginning of the end of the age of reason, which is characterized by communication with words. Baba started His silence by first giving up the spoken word. He did not speak again for forty-four years.
The Avatar of the cycle came to usher in this age of rapid communication. This makes it all the more astonishing that Meher Baba began to observe silence so early in His life; for we think of communication as mainly consisting of speech. But for Meher Baba, communication was something far greater than the spoken word alone. In the early days after Baba went into silence, His disciples were afraid that they were being cut off from communication with the Divine Beloved. But soon it became evident that Meher Baba had for His use numerous other avenues of communication.
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When Avatar Meher Baba began His Silence, in ninteen twenty- five, that was the beginning of the end of the age of reason, which is characterized by communication with words. Meher Baba started His silence by first giving up the spoken word. He did not speak again for forty-four years.
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Shortly after becoming silent, Meher Baba began work upon the writing of a secret book. He worked on it inside a tiny construction at lower Meherabad, known as "the table box." Work on this book continued for one year. After it was finished, Baba carried the book with Him for a long while wherever He went, even to America. But somewhere, over many years, the book disappeared. Apparently now no one knows where it is. Baba implied it was intended to be His communication to a future humanity.
We know of no previous Avatar who transmitted anything of length in writing directly from His own hand. Thus, we may assume the book which Meher Baba wrote with His own hand is of utmost importance for the world.
Upon completion of His secret book, Baba gave up writing by hand. Soon after, He began to communicate to those around Him by means of the English alphabet lettered onto a small board, which He could carry conveniently in the pocket of His jacket. We must remember that everything Meher Baba did was extremely far-reaching in its symbolic implications. Baba has told us His every action carried some deep and purposeful meaning.
Though He had given up both the spoken and written word, the Avatar still had much to give to the world in the form of printed material. It appears that by means of published books of the Avatar's words, Baba was slowing the momentum of the age of reason, as if He were burning up the reasoning process through His own revelations. God as Avatar, being the fountainhead of all knowing, and hence of real communication – with or without an alphabet board, hand gestures, facial expressions or anything else – can touch every mind and every heart.
Meher Baba communicatiing through finger movements. A painting by Lyn Ott.
By nineteen fifty-four Meher Baba still had not publicly declared to the world who, in fact, He Was. He had first to bring forth a book that would define "for the intellectual convulsions of the mind of man," what exactly an Avatar is. Only after that could He declare to one and all, and in perfect humility, that He WAS the Avatar. All the preliminary work from nineteen twenty-five to nineteen fifty-five had been, step by step, preparing the basis for that declaration. Meher Baba's book, God Speaks, became the Avatar's "last word" in His great work of winding down the age of reason. At last, at sixty, Baba was completing His preparations to let the world know who, in fact, He Is.
His declaration would leave in the past the entire framework of reason, for it defies all conventional reason for anyone to believe that infinite God can and does descend into the finite form of an ordinary living human being. That, however, was what had to happen in the end-time of this great cycle of time. When Meher Baba gave up His use of the alphabet board, that decisive act initiated mankind's real advance from the age of reason into the age of intuitional communication. After giving up the alphabet board, which represented for us man's faculty of reason, finally Meher Baba began to communicate through his own language of eloquent hand gestures."
We must remember that everything Meher Baba did was extremely far-reaching in its symbolic implications. Meher Baba has told us His every action carried some deep and purposeful meaning.
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These gestures can only be understood by intuition. As Eruch and the other mandali were learning that beautiful, new, intuitive language of the heart, the Beloved appears to have been giving a momentous push to communications in the life of humanity. This great new mode of communication bypasses intellectual entrapment by arising directly from the graceful movement of the Avatar's own hands. We witness the evidence of this now being kept alive on film. In this way through the living out of His own personal life, Meher Baba has lifted the world from the age of reason to the age of intuition.
In the full bloom of this new age of intuition, mankind will accept the supreme authority of Meher Baba's Avatarhood within all of creation and beyond. Intuitively all will understand that Meher Baba is One with God. This intuition enlivens not so much intellectual understanding as direct knowing; and that knowing resides always in the heart. The knowing that arises from intuition will remain the certainty that God is eternally with us, closer to each of us than our very breath.
This knowing is Avatar Meher Baba's Gift to the world. And this knowledge itself is beyond words.