Thursday, May 21, 2020

Repeating His Name


I'm very near to finishing the third book of David Fenster's absorbing trilogy: "Mehera-Meher: A Divine Romance". At one point, Mehera says this in reference to repeating Meher Baba's name:
“You must repeat his name. It is essential to repeat his name because God's name should be on your lips as much as possible. When you are doing anything, you must feel that 'Baba, you are with me.' Wherever you are, you must feel his companionship. You must make him your companion. See that when you remember Baba, he is very near you. He is there all the time, but your love should be there to remember him. It is only that you can't see him. He can see you and is happy with your love. "Whatever amount you love him, even that much makes him happy. Give him more, and it will give him that much more happiness. Even the love that you have now for Baba is making him feel happy. You want to love him more and you will. The soil takes its own time to nourish the plant before it can bear fruit."
In reading this, I was reminded of the power of Meher Baba's name in my own life. In 1968, when I attended a Baba talk at the University of Queensland presented by Bill Le Page and another Baba Lover, all that I took away was the name: Meher Baba. Remarkably, with no reinforcement whatever over the next thirteen years, I remembered that name when I came across "God Speaks" and saw who the author was.


I kept that book on my bookshelf for another twelve years. Every few years, I would pick the book up and try to make sense of it before putting it down in frustration. In 1993, the penny dropped as they say and my spiritual adventure began. I was 44 years old and my meandering path through life had finally brought me to my Hidaya, as Islam calls it, meaning:
One of the beautiful names of Allah is Al-Hadi (The Guide), and Hidaya (Guidance) is one of the most important themes of the Holy Qur’an. Hidaya means “To lead and to guide.” From it also comes the word Hadiyyah, which means, “present or gift.” Hidaya, or Guidance, is the gift of The Creator to His creation. 
According to Imam Raghib Al-Isphani, the famous lexicographer of the Holy Qur’an, Hidaya means “showing the way or leading to the goal in a gentle and kind way.” It means both explanation and direction; and it also means helping and supporting a person to reach to his goal.
Source

"God Speaks" was certainly my BEACON OF LIGHT but it was Meher Baba's name that echoed in the halls of my memory down all those meandering years from 1968 until 1981 and gave the book its special meaning to me. Thus I am fully in agreement with Mehera when she says:
“You must repeat his name. It is essential to repeat his name because God's name should be on your lips as much as possible.
Of course, there are many names for God and one can repeat them all or repeat only one. It's up to the individual. For me it will be Meher Baba.

ADDENDUM

As I composed this post, on the 21st May 2020, I finished the third volume and was made aware that Mehera passed away at Meherazad on the 20th May 1989 at 9:43am.

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Secular Humanism

The term "secular humanism" is described on the website Free Inquiry in the following terms:
Secular humanism is comprehensive, touching every aspect of life including issues of values, meaning, and identity. Thus it is broader than atheism, which concerns only the nonexistence of god or the supernatural. Important as that may be, there’s a lot more to life … and secular humanism addresses it.
Secular humanism is nonreligious, espousing no belief in a realm or beings imagined to transcend ordinary experience. 
Secular humanism is a life-stance, or what Council for Secular Humanism founder Paul Kurtz has termed a eupraxsophy: a body of principles suitable for orienting a complete human life. As a secular life-stance, secular humanism incorporates the Enlightenment principle of individualism, which celebrates emancipating the individual from traditional controls by family, church, and state, increasingly empowering each of us to set the terms of his or her own life. 
Secular humanism is philosophically naturalistic. It holds that nature (the world of everyday physical experience) is all there is, and that reliable knowledge is best obtained when we query nature using the scientific method. Naturalism asserts that supernatural entities like God do not exist, and warns us that knowledge gained without appeal to the natural world and without impartial review by multiple observers is unreliable. 
Secular humanism provides a cosmic outlook—a world-view in the broadest sense, grounding our lives in the context of our universe and relying on methods demonstrated by science. Secular humanists see themselves as undesigned, unintended beings who arose through evolution, possessing unique attributes of self-awareness and moral agency. 
Secular humanists hold that ethics is consequential, to be judged by results. This is in contrast to so-called command ethics, in which right and wrong are defined in advance and attributed to divine authority. “No god will save us,” declared Humanist Manifesto II (1973), “we must save ourselves.” Secular humanists seek to develop and improve their ethical principles by examining the results they yield in the lives of real men and women.

Figure 1: Paul Kurtz, in 2010, published books and magazines
devoted to fact-based, not faith-based, solutions to human problems.Credit...

Paul Kurtz (December 21, 1925 – October 20, 2012) is regarded as "the father of secular humanism" and here is the link to the Wikipedia article about him. For anyone who has read E. Michael Jones' "The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit", it will not come as no surprise to learn that Kurtz was Jewish. Any reference to Jews nowadays is likely to be denounced as anti-semitism, unless it is unreservedly complimentary. This is unfortunate as it promotes polarisation and suppresses any sort of rational discussion. One must be either philo-semitic or anti-semitic. There can be no in-between.

In an obituary for him in The New York Times, it's written that:
In 1980, in response to the conservative religious movement the Moral Majority, Professor Kurtz founded the journal Free Inquiry. In its inaugural issue he drafted another statement, “A Secular Humanist Declaration,” in which he warned that “the reappearance of dogmatic authoritarian religions” had become a threat to intellectual freedom, human rights and scientific progress. The statement, signed by 61 scholars, directed its objections toward “fundamentalist, literalist and doctrinaire Christianity; a rapidly growing and uncompromising Muslim clericalism in the Middle East and Asia; the reassertion of orthodox authority by the Roman Catholic papal hierarchy; nationalist religious Judaism; and the reversion to obscurantist religions in Asia.”
Probably Kurtz was well-intentioned and genuinely concerned about "the reappearance of dogmatic authoritarian religions". He felt secular humanism was the solution, just as Karl Marx, another Jew, felt that communism was the solution. In theory, communism did hold promise and yet things went terribly wrong in its implementation. The reason was that humans got in the way and monsters like Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung perverted its original intent and created tyrannies. It will be the same way with secular humanism. Though it "celebrates emancipating the individual from traditional controls by family, church, and state", the reality is proving very different. 

As religions weaken within societies, secular humanism gathers strength. However, it replaces religion by science and promotes scientists as the new priests. Science has emerged as the new tyranny and promises to be far worse than communism ever was. The scientists have been bought off by corporate interests who fund and thus direct their research and development. Only compliant scientists receive grants and the opportunity to rise through the ranks to assume positions of leadership in influential scientific organisations. The non-compliant are banished to the wilderness. 

If the scientific method were adhered to by these scientists then some degree of rationality might prevail. However, it has been abandoned and thus the high priests of the Church of Climatology pontificate, the Vaccine Industry thrives and humanity moves ever closer to the Gates of Hell with the assistance of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Pseudoscience, masquerading as science, has been hijacked by a global elite that does indeed want to emancipate the individual from the traditional controls of family, church, and state. Its intention however, is to impose new shackles.

Individuals have traditionally drawn strength through identification with their family, religion and country. It is this sort of identification that the global elite wish to undermine. The LGBT movement has certainly undermined the traditional concept of what constitutes a family. Secular humanism is ready to step in to take the place of religion for those individuals who abandon their faith. Immigration and refugees have altered the original ethnic composition of countries. 


Individuals with weak or non-existent ties to their family, religion and country are easy to manipulate and ultimately subjugate. The goal of the global elite is to enforce total subjugation and conformity. Secular humanism plays an unwitting role in this by encouraging people to abandon religion and replace it by faith in science. The graphic stating that "Science flies you to the moon, religion into skyscrapers" perfectly captures this incentive. 

However, what if NASA never took humans to the Moon and what if religious fanatics were not responsible for the destruction of the twin towers? Personally, I don't believe humans landed on the Moon and I don't believe that some Moslems armed with box cutters seized control of three airplanes. It is for this reason that I find the graphic so ironic. Secular humanism maintains "that nature is all there is" and "that supernatural entities like God do not exist". Pathetically, it offers science as a replacement.


What might God have to say about all of this? Well, if one accepts that Meher Baba was God Incarnate, as I do, then this is what He had to say:
It is only through love that you can begin to unlearn, thus eventually putting an end to all that you do not know. God-Love penetrates all illusion, while no amount of illusion can penetrate God-Love. 
Start learning to love God by beginning to love those whom you cannot. You will find that in serving others you are serving yourself. The more you remember others with kindness and generosity, the less you remember yourself; and the less you can remember yourself the more you forget yourself. And when you completely forget yourself, you find me as the source of all love. 
Give up parroting in all its aspects. Start practicing whatever you truly feel to be true and justly to be just. Do not make a show of your faith and beliefs. You have not to give up your religion but to give up clinging to the outer crust of mere ritual and ceremonies. To get to the fundamental core of Truth underlying all religions, reach beyond religion. 
Through endless time, God's greatest gift is continuously given in silence. But when mankind becomes completely deaf to the thunder of His Silence, God incarnates as man. The Unlimited assumes the limited to shake maya-drugged humanity to a consciousness of its true destiny and to give a spiritual push to the world by his physical presence on earth. He uses the body for his Universal work, to be discarded in final sacrifice, as soon as it has served its purpose. 
God has come again and again in various forms, has spoken again and again in different languages the same one Truth — but how many are there that live up to it? Instead of making Truth the vital breath of his life, man compromises by making over and over again a mechanical religion of it, as a handy staff to lean on in time of adversity, as a soothing balm for his conscience or as a tradition to be followed in the footsteps of the past. 
Man's inability to live God's words makes them a mockery. How many Christians follow Christ's teaching to "turn the other cheek" or to "love thy neighbour as thyself?" How many Muslims follow Muhammad's precept to "hold God above everything else?" How many Hindus "bear the Torch of Righteousness at all cost?" How many Buddhists live the "life of pure compassion" expounded by Buddhism? How many Zoroastrians "think truly, speak truly and act truly?" Link
Secular humanism maintains that "supernatural entities like God do not exist". Meher Baba, with his divine authority, assured as that GOD IS and there is really nothing but God. In the quote above, Baba gives us directions about how to connect with God. My contrarian views about 9/11, the Moon landings, vaccinations, climate change and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are my own and can be disregarded. The point of my post is that secular humanism offers no hope and that religion does not need to be abandoned but reinterpreted:
You have not to give up your religion but to give up clinging to the outer crust of mere ritual and ceremonies. To get to the fundamental core of Truth underlying all religions, reach beyond religion.