In reference to the abundance of so-called saints and false gurus in the East, Baba once stopped the singing and commented:
“They are like seashells scattered on the beach, their superfluous glitter attracting the loiterers on the beach, who pick them up and think they have gained the treasure of the sea. But it is a far cry from the ‘Pearl’ ensconced in the depths of the Ocean. And so it is that Hafiz says:
“How foolish people are who compare pearls with seashells.
The real pearl is here. Do not run after shells.”
When Baba quoted Hafiz’s “the real pearl is here,” he pointed to himself.
A few times he explained a line or two from a ghazal of the poet Jigar:
“When I dive into the ocean of love,the waves of suffering embrace me.That embrace is like the embrace of my mother.They are chicken-hearted [coward] who seek the safety of the shores!”
Baba conveyed these observations in June of 1963 and it is reported in Lord Meher, American ed., Bhau Kalchuri, Vol. 18, p. 6189.
In seeking the pearl in the depths of the Ocean however, many seekers (those who are not "chicken-hearted" and who have chosen not to "seek the safety of the shores") still become distracted by the sights they encounter. These seekers are the "masts" or God-intoxicated persons whose spiritual progress is arrested on one of the higher planes. As Meher Baba says (Lord Meher p. 2031):
How does it happen that some men and women become masts?
There are those who have become masts whose minds have become unbalanced through unceasing dwelling upon thoughts of God, so that they neglect all normal human requirements.
There are those whose minds have become unbalanced by sudden contact with a highly advanced spiritual being.
There are those who have sought spiritual experience and have met a crisis from which they do not recover.
What characterises all masts is their concentration upon the love of God.
What caught my attention recently was something Don Stevens said in a YouTube video that I was watching:
Baba told him that his work with masts was partly to prepare them for their next life in which their minds would not be unbalanced as they were in their current life. Instead, they would return and retain their spiritual status while being able to function in the world. This would provide a spiritual push to the world's inhabitants. In this way, Baba was seeding the future and ensuring the continued release of the spiritual energy after he was gone.
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| Figure 1 |
The major focus of the Don Steven's video was on "God Speaks", the book that Baba dictated and for which Don provided the introduction. Baba told him that this book had great spiritual energy and that anybody reading the book, whether they understand it fully or not, would benefit. Thus in another way, Baba was "seeding the future", not with returned masts but with the latent spiritual energy contained in the words of the book. These are words that Baba himself painstakingly selected to convey his explanation of the creation process.
The book is freely available for download from the Internet and I'm sure that over the coming decades more and more people will download it or purchase a physical copy. I'm lucky to have a 1955 edition that came into my possession fortuitously in around 1981. The latent energy of the words in the book remained latent until their explosion in my consciousness in 1993. Figure 1 shows the book and the box that I now keep it in. Although I'm an enthusiastic reader of ebooks, I must say that I'm happy that I have a physical copy of "God Speaks". The book is the reason that I came to Baba in the first place. It was the seed that took twelve years to germinate in the stony ground of my arid consciousness.
