Silence Day 2024

It's that time of the year again. This day marks the 99th anniversary of the beginning of Baba's silence. I was awake just before midnight and the moment I awoke I remembered that it was Silence Day. A few minutes later I checked my phone and it was 00:04. It's now 00:36 and I've had breakfast and am ready to start the working day so to speak. 

AVATAR MEHER BABA using the alphabet board to communicate with His followers.

Even though I don't work, there are chores to be completed. Apart from those however, I want to spend the day being more mindful of Baba and appreciative of my great good fortune in having come to know of Him. In 1967, I first saw the name Meher Baba in a book titled "A Search in Secret India" by Paul Brunton. It had been lent to me by my now long lost friend Steve Ross. I first heard the name Meher Baba in 1968, during a talk given at the University of Queensland by Bill Le Page (now deceased).

AVATAR MEHER BABA (left) with Frank Simon Hendrick, Francis Brabazon and Bill Le Page in 1954.

During these two years, Meher Baba was still alive and it was the talk by Bill Le Page that embedded Baba's name in my memory. I was unimpressed by Bill's presentation and quickly forgot all about it. I can still see myself sitting in that largely empty lecture hall, unaware of the profundity of the occasion. I came away with nothing but His name and, thanks to His grace, that proved to be enough. It was not until 1993, at the age of 44, that I finally came to Baba but the seed had been planted that evening in the lecture hall.

If His name hadn't been buried in my subconscious mind, then the book "God Speaks" that I stumbled upon in about 1981 would have meant nothing to me. Seeing the author's name triggered an urge to acquire the book and give it a place on my bookshelf where it remained, largely ignored, for the next twelve years. However, I did very occasionally open it up and start reading it only to quickly abandon the attempt as the words made no sense to me. That all changed in 1993, again through His grace, and in the next seven years I came to know the details of Baba's advent.

So here I am at age 75 observing silence on Silence Day. I'm thinking I'd best not go for my usual morning walk as I may be lured into verbal communication. As usual I'll stay at home and avoid even going out the front door to sweep the fallen leaves away because I always, if I encounter him, say good morning to the guy next door whose task it is to clean the bird and cat cages. In the past, I've even slipped up by saying something to my dog but now that she's gone that won't happen. It's only my wife and granddaughter that I am at risk of talking to but they are quite familiar with this annual event and are understanding of its significance.

On this day I'll play some of what I consider Baba music. For more about these songs, the following links are available:

• https://sean-reeves.blogspot.com/2021/08/its-been-long-long-long-time.html
• https://sean-reeves.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-one.html
• https://sean-reeves.blogspot.com/2021/12/across-bridge.html
• https://sean-reeves.blogspot.com/2024/01/im-on-your-side.html

Special prominence must be given to "Begin the Beguine" by Pete Townshend because this was Baba's favourite song and Pete of course is a long time Baba Lover.

Having had only about five hours slept, I fell asleep again between 03:00 and 06:00. For the first time ever, I had several dreams in which I knew I was observing silence but slipped up in various interactions with dream characters. Interesting. 

Listening to Van the Man, I was captivated by the lyrics to his song "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You". Let's not forget that Jim Reeves wrote a song with the same name (but different melody and lyrics) but here are the lyrics to Van's song:

Have I Told You Lately That I Love You

Have I told you lately that I love you?

Have I told you there's no one above you

Fill my heart with gladness

Take away my sadness

Ease my troubles, that's what you do

Now the mornin' sun in all it's glory

Greets the day with hope and comfort, too

You fill my life with laughter

You can make it better

Ease my troubles that's what you do

There's a love that's divine

And it's yours and mine, like the sun

At the end of the day

We should give thanks and pray to the One

And to say, 'Have I told you lately that I love you?'

Have I told ya there's no one above you?

Fill my heart with gladness

Take away my sadness

Ease my troubles, that's what you do

There's a love that's divine

And it's yours and mine

And it shines like the sun

At the end of the day

We should give thanks

And pray to the One

And so

Have I told you lately that I love you?

Have I told you there's no one above you?

Fill, fill, fill, fill, fill, fill my heart with gladness

Take away my sadness

(Take away my sadness)

Ease my troubles, that's what you do

Fill my life with gladness

Take away my sadness

(Take away my sadness)

Ease my troubles that's what you do

Fill my life with gladness

And take away my sadness

(Take away my sadness)

Ease my troubles that's what you

This is another excellent devotional song and I'm reminded how the use of the term "The One" is preferable to the use of the term "God" which means so many different things to so many different people. Using this terminology helps overcome the associations, good and bad, that adhere to the latter term. We can thus say that Meher Baba and the Sadgurus are one with The One and from The One arise The Many. 

Listen Humanity

The following arrived in my Inbox recently from the Meher Baba Bombay Centre:

Baba did not come to Meherabad on November 9th (1955). On that day, Adi Jr., Francis Brabazon and Don Stevens returned to Ahmednagar from their trip to the Ellora Caves, and the next morning, were driven with Nariman, Meherjee and Vishnu to Meherazad. Baba discussed matters with the mandali and then gave Francis and Don a tour of the property. Eruch took them up Seclusion Hill.

That afternoon, Baba was driven to Meherabad. At Upper Meherabad, he called Don Stevens and asked how he had enjoyed the meetings. Don recollected:

The whole stay, of course, was something so incredible, so beautiful, so very deeply moving, that I had great difficulty in expressing any sort of sentiment. This was always typical of me, and I think typical of a great many people in Baba’s presence: one found oneself tongue-tied. All one could do was to feel utter frustration in not being able to carry on one’s own side of the conversation with Baba, and also a deep overwhelming sense of warmth, which, in any case, could not have been put into words even if one had been in better form.

Baba had had a small chair placed beside his chair, on which were kept a small stack of papers. After Baba listened to Don’s reactions to the sahavas, Baba beckoned for the papers. Eruch handed them to him, and Baba put them on his knees and began rifling through them. Eruch explained, “Baba has here a collection of various articles he has given out at various public gatherings. Some are longer than others. All have been carefully collected and have never been published before. Baba wants to know if you would like to take this collection, edit it as you have done with God Speaks, build it up, handle it in any fashion that you feel fit – and perhaps make it into a small book which you can publish after God Speaks appears?”

Don, touched that Baba would show such confidence in him, immediately said, “Yes, I would like to do this. I would be very happy.”

Baba commented, “In fact, you might possibly want to combine it in some fashion – I leave it entirely in your hands – with a description of what you have experienced in this sahavas.”

Don nodded, and Baba continued, “If this appeals to you, I will make available to you the transcripts of the meetings, and you can weave your own descriptions of the events around them.”

Don said, “I think it is a wonderful idea, Baba.”

“You can write to Ramjoo Abdulla or Bal Natu about any questions you might have,” Baba concluded.

In this manner, the book Listen, Humanity came into being.

Lord Meher, Original Publication, Bhau Kalchuri, Vol. 13, pp. 4705 – 4707.

After having Meher Baba's book, God Speaks, in my possession for well over a decade and finding it incomprehensible, I suddenly had an epiphany in 1993 that suddenly made it comprehensible. I can thank Baba's grace for that. I still had no idea of Baba's life as these were pre-Internet days but there were bookstores and one weekend in that year, in a small town in southern New South Wales, I chanced upon Don Stevens' Listen Humanity.

************************** 

Cover of the book that was
discovered in the bookstore.
I still have the physical book.

************************** 

My wife at the time drew my attention to it and we quickly purchased it. It was an absorbing read and expanded my knowledge about Baba considerably. There was no mention of his visit to Australia however, but there was a sticker or stamp showing that it had originated in a town called Woombye in Queensland.

I thought this odd and had never heard of a town called Woombye. Little did I know at the time that it was located only an hour's drive from Brisbane where I grew up. So Listen Humanity became an important stepping stone in my journey to Baba. The book is freely available as a PDF from this site. It's so easy now to access the book but back in 1993 it required serendipity and Baba's grace to stumble upon it. 

Don Stevens passed away on 26th April, 2011 in London, England. Don wrote the following in which he makes direct reference to God Speaks and Listen Humanity.

As I reflect, I find that I divide Baba's written words into at least three fairly distinct categories. The first, and for me the most powerful, are those he dictated in the manner he carefully explained to me twice: firstly, to a mandali, who took his notes of Baba's words, wrote them up in detail, and then submitted them usually the following day to Baba for word-by-word correction by Baba himself. Baba also explained this correction process to me in detail, so there would be no question that the decisions and the final words were his own. It was in this careful context that Baba then added a further fact of the greatest importance to the spiritual seeker. To these carefully dictated words intended for release or hearing at a public ceremony, he attached something like an atomic bomb of spiritual energy, which would be available to and absorbed by devotees who worked with these words. Such words I am certain are now to become a major source of the continuing spiritual push of the Avatar to and through his devotees. In fact, this is exactly what Baba said to me, and charged me with telling his devotees. The chief bodies of such words as described by Baba are the first eight chapters of God Speaks, Part II of Listen, Humanity, and the Song of the New Life. I would personally add O Parvardigar and the Prayer of Repentance. Source.

I've decided to read the physical book again. Normally I only read e-books these days so it will be something of a novelty to read in this way again as I once did over 30 years ago.

Cosmic Consciousness

 In making reference to Balzac in a recent post to my Staying Healthy blog, I was reminded of Bucke's "Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind" published in 1901 and recommended to me by my mother sometime in the 1960's. She must have come across it thanks to the Theosophical Society whose meetings she often attended in the late fifties and early sixties. The book can be downloaded from PDFDRIVE as well as many other sources probably.

Here is an excerpt from his chapter on Balzac:

While still very young Balzac decided to be a writer. It seems that he felt, even as a boy, that he was destined to do something great in that line, and he composed at school, among other things, a treatise on the will and an epic poem. Later he wrote at Paris, in the course of ten years, mostly over the pseudonymn of "Horace de Saint Aubin," some forty volumes, said to be almost entirely valueless. A good authority sums up this episode in Balzac's history as follows: "Before he was thirty years old he had published, under a variety of pseudonyms, some twenty long novels, veritable Grub Street productions, written in sordid Paris attics, in poverty, in perfect obscurity. Several of these 'œuvres de jeunesse' have lately been republished, but the best of them are unreadable. No writer ever served harder apprenticeship to his art, or lingered more hopelessly at the base of the ladder of fame." Then, at the age of thirty, his genius began to dawn in "Les Chouans" and "Physiologie du Marriage." He must have entered Cosmic Consciousness about the early part of 1831, when thirty-two years of age, since "Louis Lambert" (which was undoubtedly conceived immediately after illumination) was written in 1832. By 1833, when he was thirty-four years of age, he had entered into full possession of his true life, a presentiment of which had dominated him from early boyhood.

It's an interesting book and Bucke does a good job of trying to make sense of such disparate characters as Jesus, Mohammed, Shakespeare, Ramakrishna, Balzac and others. His mistake is to lump them all together under the umbrella of having attained "Cosmic Consciousness". Perhaps he wasn't aware of the seven planes of consciousness. This would have helped him differentiate between the levels of consciousness that each had reached. It was only in 1993, after finally grasping what Meher Baba was writing about in his book "God Speaks", that I understood about these various levels.

Balzac obviously gained access to the higher planes or was a conduit for entities resident on those planes but he was far from the ultimate reality that is realised by beings who attain to the seventh plane of consciousness. This state could justifiably be described as Cosmic Consciousness but not the lower states and it is attained by very few. Once attained it can never be lost. Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Gautama Siddharta, Ramakrisha and of course Meher Baba himself all attained this state. Baba was only seven years at the time the book was written and He himself did not know the future that awaited Him.

Seeding the Future

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.

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.

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.

Interview with Don Stevens

The first book that I ever read that was written by Meher Baba was God Speaks (link to Part 1, link to Part 2) but the first book about him that I ever read was Listen Humanity by Don Stevens. Though an accomplished author, Don was also very personable and articulate as can be seen in this recent (14th April 2007) upload to the MeherBabaArchives YouTube channel:

There is great information about Don Stevens on Meher Baba's Life & Travels website. Don died in London on April 26th 2011, having being born in Nevada in 1919. It was interesting to hear him mention that after deciding to leave the oil industry, he considered training as a Jungian psychotherapist. Of course, Baba made it quite clear to Don that his involvement in the oil industry was needed to expiate his karmic dues and he did not want him to leave it.

Returning to that first book about Baba that I read, I came across Listen Humanity in a little bookstore in a small town (Nowra I think) south of Sydney. At the time, I was with my second wife Sylvia who shared in a number of serendipitous discoveries relating to Meher Baba. It must have been late 1993 or early 1994. It was Sylvia who found the book, bought it and wrote the date and a comment inside it. The physical book is in Jakarta, while I'm currently in Brisbane.