Upcoming Special Presentations on Meher Baba’s Life and Message
The Center is dedicated to being a vibrant source of information about Meher Baba’s life and message. The programs listed below reflect a variety of ways of presenting and sharing this information to all who are interested. For more information on the “Meher Baba’s Life and Message” program, please click here.
October 18th-20th, 2024 : 10-11:30 a.m. & 2-3:30 p.m., at the Meeting Place
Meher Baba’s New Life: Then and Now
A special presentation by Ward Parks on the History and Significance of Meher Baba’s ‘New Life’
On 16th October 1949, Meher Baba renounced the Old Life with all its trappings of Perfect Masterhood and stepped into the New Life with twenty Companions. For two and a half years, Baba and His Companions wandered without fixed residence or headquarters around the Indian subcontinent –at times begging for food and sleeping under the stars. Baba’s activities encompassed the so-called Gypsy, Langoti, Begging, and Labor phases. He drafted three major “plans” for His companions. He served the poor and worked with the masts, and He completed major seclusions.
The New Life came to a head between October 1951 and February 1952 with what Baba called “Manonash” or the “annihilation of the mind.” And through this radical act Meher Baba drew the New Life to a close, stepping into a new kind of “Life” in which the Old and New Lives were both encompassed. This was the “Life” that provided the platform for His public declaration of Avatarhood in February 1954.
What exactly was the New Life? Most of Baba’s statements describe it in purely negational terms, setting forth rules, restrictions and prohibitions. Yet, amid the impossible difficulties, in the years afterwards some of the “companions” described this period as the freest time in all their years with Baba. What do we make of such stark contradictions? How does one reconcile Meher Baba stepping down from His Godhood and yet demanding implicit obedience?
About this unfathomable and enigmatic period, Baba said, “This New Life will live by itself eternally, even if there is no one to live it.”
Over six sessions that will go through the preparations, indications and various phases of the New Life, Ward Parks will explore this matchless period and its implications for Baba’s lovers – then and now.