Meher Baba and Me, a Story of Awakening:
How These Pages Came to Be

(Note: This is my "personal" Meher Baba story. For  additional, "objective" information about 
Meher Baba, you might try MEHER BABA INFORMATION . And there is a vast trove of 
Meher Baba links at www.avatarmeherbaba.org)

    Here is Meher Baba at about age 70.
This card, which became popular among Westerners drawn to Baba especially in  the '60s and early '70s, much later  became the creative inspiration of Bobby  McFerrin's popular song.

      THE AUTHOR OF these pages first encountered the name Meher Baba while walking to breakfast with an acquaintance at college in Sarasota, Florida, in 1969. The friend was carrying a newspaper, glancing at it as we quietly walked.
      Half way to the cafeteria, he suddenly said, "Here's an interesting article!" and   proceeded to read a brief story on the Obituary Page. The piece said something like, "There was a man named Meher Baba, who lived in India and did not speak. He maintained for many years that he was God, and would break his silence before he died. He died yesterday, January 31, 1969."

     My emotional response to those words was a kind of whimsical delight that in our modern world someone, somewhere, would either claim he was God, or maintain silence—let alone both!

     Before long, though, the name Meher Baba faded from my consciousness.

     Two years later, I was visiting Chicago, where I had first started college. I had left home at 18 to attend Northwestern University, then transferred to the Sarasota school for my Junior year. Recently I'd heard that one of my former "radical" comrades from Northwestern had somehow become connected with Meher Baba. One day, shortly before I intended to end my Chicago visit, he phoned and asked if I wanted to stop by the advertising agency where he worked, to say hello.

     "Sure," I said, finding my old friend's voice utterly disarming. In truth, I'd been avoiding this fellow till now, precisely because he was "into Meher Baba" and was a former radical working as an ad-man only two years later! A girl I knew had told me she'd seen him on TV selling laundry detergent! Such a total transformation, so quickly, just seemed too much.

     The next morning I took the El train downtown to the Prudential Building where my friend worked. I caught the elevator to his ad agency, on the upper floors of the building. My friend came out to the reception area and embraced me. Then he led me down a corridor and opened a doorway into what was the tiniest private office I'd ever seen.

     There were a desk and two chairs in the office—no room for anything else. One of the chairs was behind the desk, the other in front. I sat, of course, in the latter. As I faced my friend in the other chair, I noticed that behind him on the wall was a large poster on yellow newwsprint paper. A man's face, in a black and white photo, looked out of the poster. The man looked to be in his twenties. He had long hair, a feathery moustache, a wisp of a beard, and the loveliest soft, clear eyes.     
                                                     
                                               

      Under the photo, in large capital letters, were the words,

I AM THE ANCIENT ONE .

     Below those words, in smaller letters, the poster read,

"I was Rama,
     I was Krishna,
    I was this one,
    I was that one,
     And now I am Meher Baba."

     Suddenly I realized that sitting in front of me was someone who could tell me more about this unusual man whose obituary had been read to me for no understandable reason on a misty Saturday morning two years before.

     "Did Meher Baba say he was God?" I asked.

     "Meher Baba says everyone and everything is God, but there are a very few who are fully conscious of that Divinity, and who therefore are really able to guide others."

     "Why shouldn't I follow Christ, or Ramakrishna?", the next question erupted out of my mouth. It included the names of two spiritual figures I had recently begun reading about.

     "Baba said he's the Avatar," replied my friend. "He said he returns to earth approximately every 700 to 1400 years, whenever people forget what we're all really here for. In recorded history, he said he came as Zoroaster, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed."

     "He's naming the greatest figures in History," I thought.

     I was experiencing a curious phenomenon. Questions had been coming to my mind as naturally as though I was following some kind of script. And yet my words were totally spontaneous.  Furthermore, each time my friend answered a question, or more accurately, told me Meher Baba's answer, I felt lighter. White birds seemed to be flying upward from my head, bearing away mental burdens, with every round of our conversation.

      This process now stopped. . My mind and the room were silent. "Maybe this Meher Baba was a really great man," the voice of my thoughts went on. "But if he died two years ago, what's the difference?"

     As that thought emerged, a very subtle presentiment, came with it: "Something might happen now!" it said. That was odd. My experience that "nothing can happen through mere conversation" had led a couple years back to more dangerous, pharmacologically-based efforts at consciousness transformation.

     "Where is he now?" I blurted out, looking at Meher Baba's picture.

     I waited for my friend to answer. Silence. In a little while, I looked back toward him. He was smiling. What about? He in fact had practically the widest grin I'd ever seen. I had seen him grinning that way once back in our college days, scruffily dressed, high on LSD, unthinkably giving a $5 bill to a beggar.

     And then, suddenly, I felt it, too, the—Love! This was Love! Not Romantic Love, not Platonic love with a small "l".This was Divine Love! I'd read of it in the Bible, in Thomas Merton, in Ramakrishna and His Disciples, without the slightest idea what the author was saying. This was God!

     The room overflowed with God, with Love! The two were Identical! The Force, the Being, was invisible, yet far more real by far than anything I'd ever known. It felt "pink", somehow, though visually I discerned no color. "I am Meher Baba," the "pinkness" was saying, silently. It a distinct Personality and yet also included my friend and me and everything else! Words like Past and Future had no meaning, only this timeless, all-embracing Love, had ever existed.

    How had I never before felt what was clearly the only essential fact of all existence? How had I failed to notice Meher Baba, who was and had always been, the Being of my own being, the Self of all?

     How long my friend and I sat there, embraced by that Divine Smile, I don't know. But when I left that room, as it says in one of the poems that follow,