Excerpts from Meher Baba Calling and Darshan Hours
You cannot bargain for love. No amount of penance, meditation, puja [ritualized worship], etc., can give that gift of love. Once the gift comes from God, it burns up all the veils of sanskaras (impressions).
To love one soul is like adding its life to your own. Your life, as it were, is multiplied and you vicariously live in two centres. If you love the whole world, you vicariously live in the whole world.
Love others as you would love yourself and all that is yours. Fortunate are they whose love is tested by misfortunes. Love demands that the lover sacrifice himself for the Beloved.
If you have that love for me that St. Francis hd for Jesus, then not only will you realize Me, but you will please Me.
The less you think of yourself and the more you think of Baba, the sooner the ego goes and Baba remains. When your ‘ego’ goes away entirely, I am one with you. So, bit by bit, ‘you’ have to go. Today your nose, tomorrow your ears, then your eyes, your hands, everything! So better think of Me when you eat, sleep, see or hear. Enjoy all; do not discard anything, but think it is Baba — Baba who enjoys, Baba who is eating, it is Baba sleeping soundly, and when you wake up remember it is Baba getting up! Keep this one thought constantly with you. If you do wrong, then think that it is Baba doing wrong! If you get a pain think that it is Baba having a pain. If you do all this sincerely, you will know something. Try to forget yourself and do all for Baba.
You should live a normal life and just love Baba and not be attached to your being. Then you will have a curtain of Baba’s Love protecting you from the world.
41 Serve Others as You Would Serve Me
Real happiness lies in making others happy. The real desire is that which leads you to become perfect in order to make others perfect. Live less for yourself and more for others. Serve others with the understanding that in them you are serving Me.
When you serve your fellow-beings with selflessness, you serve God. Selfless service means that it has to be so very natural that even the thought that you are serving should be absent. What God’s aspect of Honesty means is that you serve others in order to make them happy at the cost of your own happiness. Honesty demands that no show and no fuss be made of your service and you treat others as you treat your own dear ones.
To love God in the most practical way is to love your fellow beings.
All I ask of you is that you love Me most and obey Me at all times. Knowing that it is impossible for you to obey Me as you should, I help you to carry out whole-heartedly what I ask you to do by repeatedly bring up to you the importance of obedience.
When you do what the Master says, the responsibility falls on Him whom you obey, even when you obey unwillingly.
You can leave your mind to my care by remembering Me or repeating My name silently as often as you can.
I want you to remain undisturbed and unshaken by the force of life’s currents, for whatever the circumstances, they too will be of My own creation.
Long for one thing, be restless for one thing; long for one thing that will kill the millions of other longings — long for union with the Beloved. You should become lost in the idea of possessing the Beloved by hook or by crook. When you are prepared in your heart of hearts to gain union with God at the cost of life and the ridicule of the whole world, then perhaps you may be said to have entered the lane of Divine Love. Even the craving for union with the Beloved creates bindings. Therefore, do not bother about separation or union — just love and love all the more; then you are able to resign yourself and your Path to the Perfecd Master who is The Way, and you undergo a gradual change and your ego asserts less and less. Then whatever the Perfect Master tells you to do, you are able to carry out.
Not by seeking individual happiness or safety but by again and again offering one’s life in the service of others is it possible to rise to the unsurpassed completeness of realized truth. God is not to be sought by running away from life but by establishing unity with the One in the many. Purity, love and service are the elements of spiritual life.
Those who cleanse their hearts of the embittering poison of selfishness, hate and greed find God as their own true Self. The truth of divine life is not a hope but a reality; all else is illusion. Have faith and you will be redeemed. Have love and you will conquer the limited self of cravings that veil your own true being as God.
[Some editions add] Then the so many deaths during the one whole life, from the beginning of evolution of consciousness to the end of involution of consciousness are like so many sleeps during one lifetime.
76 Divine Love
God and Love are identical, and one who has Divine Love has received God.
Divine Love makes us true to ourselves and to others. Divine Love is the solution to our difficulties and problems. It frees us from every kind of binding. It makes us feel one with the whole universe. Divine love purifies our hearts and glorifies our being.
Start learning to love God by loving those whom you cannot love. The more you remember others with kindness and generosity the more you forget yourself, and when you completely forget yourself, you find God.
My Message always has been and always will be of Divine Love. Let the world know it.
Baba had asked one of the visitors, a lecturer in a college, to come on a certain date, which he missed. He came to see Baba after a few weeks. Baba asked him if he had read His books. The visitor replied, :Yes, Baba. They are really a blessing to the whole world.”
Baba said, “But what about you? Had you read the books as they should have been read, you would have left the work in hand to keep the appointment. It was for your good. My love is impersonal and unconditional too. In spite of your failure to come, I love you too.”
When you wear long hair or put on sadhu clothes [traditional mode of dress of a seeker in India], indirectly you court respect. A false sense of advancement in spirituality is liable to be created when you try to lead a life in some other way than that of common people. Others begin to look upon you with respect and you begin to accept homage unauthoritatively — outwardly in the name of God, but deep within there is nothing but self-gratification. As time passes by, the superiority complex is nourished and the ego craves for even greater honors. This is a dangerous pitfall!
In a God-realized Master the Real Ego is established. He “sees” Himself in everyone and everything. The Master in His Divinity is so complete that He becomes the object of meditation and worship for all. Thus, He has the authority to accept homage. All His actions are non-actions and hence are non-binding.
To become completely free from sanskaras bindings, the intercession of the Master is necessary, The awakening of love is the remedy. Then one rare being gets released from all sanskaras bindings through the Grace of the Perfect Master.
Pointing to a plump person at his side, Baba said:
Here is a heavy person. Suppose he wants to fly high in the air — not in an airplane — I am giving only a simile. What should he do? What should he become? If he becomes light, like a dry leaf, then just a breeze is enough to lift him up. Owing to ego, your life becomes infinitely heavy and bulky. Ego is the obstacle.
The false ego must be effaced. But this is almost impossible. Removal of the false ego is the end of separate existence.
Our ego keeps us aloof from our own Real Self. Ego is so mighty that it makes us deceive our own Self. It has been attached to one’s Self from the very beginning. It appears to be so natural a part of our own very self that, under the pretext of our understanding, this ego gets tickled instantaneously the very next moment gets depressed. If I say, “You are a wonderful person,” you will at once be tickled, but you will express it by saying, “Baba, I am just your slave.” This apparently humble statement may imply anything but humility. The next moment, if I were to point out one of your weaknesses, you would at once feel depressed, but you wouldn’t express it, You would say, “Baba, after all I am a human being.” By this statement you try to conceal what you feel within you, for ego assumes false appearances. It is very difficult to be natural and to express what you feel within — the “false ego” is the stumbling block. What is meant by the annihilation of the ego? It means to be fully conscious in sound sleep — fully conscious in the fully unconscious state! Until the Sadguru bestows His Grace, this is not possible.