“Becoming a Real Person”

Meher Baba has said that He is the essence of your very being which initially provoked you to ask the question: Who is Meher Baba? Even in those born into a Baba family, who presume they know about Baba, He provokes this same question, for the question can only be answered through a personal awakening in each one. By being the “Provoker” in our lives, Baba has made it clear that He is the One behind the scenes who draws us closer to Him.

From my experience, you can’t just say, yes, I know who Baba is, He is God in human form and then sit back and occasionally ask for His assistance in your life. For when Baba arouses you to ask, “Who is Meher Baba?” this question comes with serious repercussions. The first thing that happened to me was that I found myself challenged to find my own inner bearings as a person, to know my own mind and heart, to get rid of all my vagueness. In 1952 in the Lagoon Cabin on the Meher Spiritual Center at Myrtle Beach, Meher Baba told Murshida Ivy Duce and Francis Brabazon: “There are three things that hinder Truth. First is temptation – very, very few people can overcome temptations; temptations of money, fame, power, lust, leadership are disastrous, very binding and very few escape it. Second, vagueness about things, and third, dishonesty.”

In one sense, Baba wanted me to know my own conscience, or inner center. This is in accord with His statement: “Do nothing even to please Me, or the world, against the dictates of your own conscience. Unhesitatingly do what you think to be right and proper, despite the opposition of the world. Let your mind be firm as a rock that resists strong blasts of wind from all sides.” Conscience is not just a feeling of rightness, it means “with knowledge” (con-scientia). It speaks in us intuitively with its own powerful voice of certainty, of knowing. Surprisingly, Baba places conscience above all else, and gives us the freedom to be guided by it. Baba is certainly not forcing us to do anything outside of our conscience.

But then Baba, the “Provoker,” plants in us the next logical question, “Am I determined to be His?” Now this question requires that we sound out our newly strengthened conscience. This question too comes with serious repercussions for implied in this question is another question, “Do I want to live for Baba or for myself?” – and Baba has pointed out you can’t do both. In a commemorative poem celebrating Baba’s first visit to Australia in 1956, Francis finishes with the line “[Now each person] must decide the issue of ‘surrendrance’ and lay down that much of his life as he will.”

“The issue of ‘surrendrance’,” is at the heart of being determined to be Baba’s. It is entirely different from the common use of the word, surrender, which implies a kind of defeat, of having no other option but to unwillingly give up everything – to become powerless. By way of contrast, “surrendrance” is a powerful act of conscience entered into with eyes fully open, joyfully, as a practical way to live “life at its best.”

“Surrendrance” is the manifestation of our determination to be His. It is exemplified in Eruch’s statement about the men mandali: “We were free men who had chosen to become His slaves, and by becoming His slaves, we became totally free from bondage to the values of worldly people.”

Eruch often shared in Mandali Hall a prayer which Baba gave to the mandali as their personal prayer: “I am not the body. I am not the mind. I am not this. I am not that. I am nothing but a living lie of that Truth that is Me and unless the lie is dead the Truth cannot be.” Essentially we are all “living lies,” egos-on-legs, pretending we are people. But the more we can become Baba’s through “surrendrance” the more chance we have of becoming a real person and less of a “living lie.” I would say the mandali are real people.

Baba has said in His message, “On the Spiritual Potential of the Film World” something about how to be a real person living, or you might say acting, in the world: “Live in the presence of God, even while acting your part, so that you can be true to yourself, to your partners and employers, and to the larger and one Indivisible Life of which you are each an inseparable part. If the world is a stage, God is the only producer, and you can never be anything but a trivial actor if you are not in unison with Him.”

The life of the ego is dominated by the constant rumblings and ruminations of the mind’s store of restless sanskaras but one who is “in unison with” Baba through “surrendrance” can at times transcend this state and become a real person acting in the world.

We desperately need to become real people in the light of what Baba has said in His messages. In the theatre of gross consciousness in which we live we may not be saints, but we can strive to be real people who can serve as channels of Baba’s creative love.

1.Who is Meher Baba: Questions and Answers on Avatar Meher Baba, by Eruch Jessawala, p. 1
2.Francis Brabazon Poet of the Silent Word, by Ross Keating, p. 88
3.The Sayings of Shri Meher Baba, 1933, by Meher Baba, p. 40
4.The Birth of the Nation, 1956, by Francis Brabazon, p. 4
5.Title of a book by Meher Baba published 1957
6.That’s How It Was, by Eruch Jessawala, p. 42
7.Meher Baba, as narrated by Davana Brown, Tavern Talk, 21 September 2001
8.The Path of Love, by Meher Baba, p. 127