Meher Baba on God

God is the only Reality

God is infinite. He is beyond the opposites of good and bad, right and wrong, virtue and vice, birth and death, pleasure and suffering. Such dual aspects do not belong to God. If you take God as one separate entity, He becomes one term in relational existence. Just as good is the counterpart of bad, God becomes the counterpart of notGod; and the Infinite comes to be looked upon as the opposite of the finite. When you talk of the Infinite and the finite, you are referring to them as two; and the Infinite has already become the second part of the duality. But the Infinite belongs to the nondual order of being. If the Infinite is looked upon as the counterpart of the finite, it is strictly speaking no longer infinite but a species of the finite; for it stands outside the finite as its opposite and is thus limited. Since the Infinite cannot be the second part of the finite, the apparent existence of the finite is false. The Infinite alone exists. God cannot be brought down to the domain of duality. There is only one being in reality and it is the universal Soul. The existence of the finite or the limited is only apparent or imaginary.

Apparent existence of the finite

You are infinite. You are really everywhere. But you think that you are the body, and therefore consider yourself limited. If you think you are the body, which is sitting, you do not know your true nature. If you were to look within and experience your own soul in its true nature, you would realize that you are infinite and beyond all creation. However, you identify yourself with the body. This false identification is due to ignorance, which makes itself effective through the medium of the mind. An ordinary person thinks that he is the physical body. A spiritually advanced individual thinks that he is the subtle body. The saint thinks that he is the mind. But in none of them is the soul having direct Self-knowledge. It is not a case of pure thinking unmixed with illusion.

The soul as Soul is infinite-aloof from mind or body-yet owing to ignorance, the soul comes under the sway of the mind and becomes a “thinker,” sometimes identifying itself with the body and sometimes with the mind. From the limited point of view of a person who has not gone beyond the domain of Maya [illusion], there are numberless individuals. It seems that there are as many individuals as there are minds and bodies. In fact, there is only one universal Soul, but the individual thinks that he is different from other individuals. The one and the same Soul is ultimately behind the minds of seemingly different individuals, and through them it has the multifarious experiences of duality. The One in the many comes to experience itself as one of the many. This is due to imagination or false thinking.

Cause of false thinking

Thinking becomes false because of the interference of sanskaras accumulated during the process of the evolution of consciousness. The function of consciousness is perverted by the operation of sanskaras, which manifest themselves as desires.

Through many lives, consciousness is continually being burdened by the aftereffects of experience. The perception of the soul is limited by these aftereffects. The thinking of the soul cannot break through the hedge created by sanskaras, and consciousness becomes a helpless captive of illusions projected by its own false thinking. This falsification of thought is present not only in cases where consciousness is partly developed but also in man, where it is fully developed. Sourced from Discourses, 7th edition online, pages 16-18.

It is truly said that God has no beginning and no end. Think this over. If He had no beginning, what was there before God? The answer is God. You cannot in imagination reach where no beginning was. The answer can only be God. What will be there after billions of years? God. Always God. This means that in eternity there is no time. Nothing has ever happened, and nothing ever will happen. There is no time factor. Billions of years ago you were; today, you are here, ever afterwards you will be. Today, all that is happening is not happening, although this does not appear to be so now.

When one has experience of eternity, one knows that God is. To say that God was, is, and will be, is wrong. All eternity is now present at this moment. So I say, God IS. Sourced from Lord Meher online, page 3603, “Three Incredible Weeks”.