Actual Freedom – Selected Correspondence by Topic

Richard’s Selected Correspondence

On Mr. Mervin Irani (aka Meher Baba)

RESPONDENT: Krishnamurti often spoke of the false division between ‘me’ and ‘not me’. He said that in actuality we are all one etc. I have a friend who read Krishnamurti all the time and we used to have interesting conversations about Krishnamurti’s writings. He seemed ok at the time. However, he began to change gradually, and at one point he confessed to me that he has understood Krishnamurti completely, he said that everything looks different and vivid, that every moment is full of joy and bliss. He seemed to be extremely happy and full of energy.

I grew a bit worried about him, as he seemed to be a bit manic. When I next saw him, he really was in a manic state. He had moved away from his wife and children, spent all his money on expensive furniture and at the same time selling everything he had previously owned. I asked him why he did this and what was going on in his mind. He had this strange look when he told me that he had heard voices that told him that he had ‘the face of love’ and that the voices called him ‘his holiness’. He was convinced that he was going through the same ‘process’ that K had gone through. When I suggested that he might need some professional help, he became angry and said that nobody could understand him. He said ‘I’m going my way’ and continued to sell everything he owned. Daily he spent several hours just wondering around streets and told me that he had close contact with nature, that he could feel very deeply the beauty of the nature. He didn’t want to see his wife or children.

As time went on, he began to isolate and didn’t want to see anyone. Occasionally he let me visit him. He was still in a manic state and told me enthusiastically about an experience he’d had: he had felt a flowing feeling in his head, he had felt that his body was not separate from the world around him. He believed that at that moment he was one with the world, that there was no separation anymore between ‘me’ and ‘not-me’ He laughed when he told me that he had had to wrap a scarf around his head tightly so that he could still feel that his head ‘belonged to him’. Also he told me that he’d had an experience where he felt that something was pulled from his head, he thought that it was his spirit being pulled away. He told me that he had panicked but then the voices had told him ‘calm down my dear child, you are not going to die, it is not always easy to be new’. This experience convinced him that he was ‘chosen one’ and that he was a living example of ‘living the teachings’.

His life quickly deteriorated. He quit his job, stopped caring about personal hygiene and only occasionally let me or his family see him. He showed me his writings, which were incomprehensible – he explained that he had found connections between almost everything in the world and he tried to express this in his writing. When anyone tried to suggest that he see a doctor, he began to had these fits of rage, he kept repeating that no-one would understand him, that he was well, he had never felt better in his life and that he would never under any circumstance accept to have medication.

This episode lasted about nine months. For the last few months I didn’t see him. Then he phoned me and spoke in a whispery voice and told me that he couldn’t understand what had went on. I went to see him. He had returned to his family and was a shadow of his former self. He told me couldn’t remember everything about the past months, but he remembered that he had felt extremely powerful. He told me that he had heard sounds louder than normally, also that the colours had looked brighter than usual and he had been much quicker than usual in anything he did. Now he was desperate and depressed and said that he felt totally empty. Nowadays he takes medication for depression and panic attacks and mainly stays at home.

So: could reading Krishnamurti be a threat to your sanity?

RICHARD: Given that 160,000,000 people were killed by sane people in wars this century, then what your friend experienced is/ was a move toward a mental health that dismisses such concepts as ‘sanity’ and ‘insanity’. Speaking personally, I experienced similar ‘parousia’ experiences and in the process lost wife, children, business, house, car, personal possessions and so on ... and both sanity and insanity. Any exploration into the human psyche – which is the human psyche – is not for the faint of heart or the weak of knee. The rewards for daring to do so are immense, however, and I thoroughly recommend entering into what others call ‘madness’.

Western counsellors, therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists have little or no grounding in matters esoteric and see neurosis or psychosis where other cultures see the profound, the sublime, the transcendent and the awesome. In India, for example, what your friend experienced is not necessarily alarming but also inspiring ... and such peoples so blessed – ‘Masts’ (male) and ‘Mastanis’ (female) – are described by Mr. Mervin Irani (aka Meher Baba) as God-mad, God-intoxicated and God-merged:

• ‘In these three types, greed, anger, avarice and lust do not exist, since the minds of the God-mad and God-intoxicated are always turned towards God, and the God-merged has no mind; their bodily actions are not under their control. They are indifferent to everything, so that their actions are either indifferently controlled, or are controlled by God. Whatever they do, whether it be called good or bad from worldly standards, it has no selfish motive or personal deliberation. So if these persons laugh or cry, seem happy or morose, caress others or beat them, they are not conscious of what they do, or of how they behave. Nevertheless, their doing acts in anger helps those on whom this unconscious anger is spent, because their selfless anger destroys the anger sanskaras of the recipient. (... ...) When the mind does not pay attention to the body, the body, naturally, automatically survives and looks after itself. Now because of a kind of universal working on the gross plane, a sort of automatic attraction takes place, which causes a man who is indifferent to cleanliness to be attracted to place himself in dirty surroundings. He does not purposely choose an unclean place, but tends to gravitate towards it, for he is himself quite indifferent either to cleanliness or to dirt on the physical plane. For those who are God-mad, God-intoxicated, or God-merged, this dirtiness does not affect their health, because the mind is not attached to the body. For those souls, good or bad, cleanliness or dirt, a palace or a hut, a spotless avenue or a filthy gutter are all the same, and they are driven into any of these places according to circumstance. It is natural for a mast to have a dirty body, and it is natural for him to be driven to dirty surroundings; but if the devotee of a mast happens to give him comfort and cleanliness, he takes it because it is forced on him – but he is quite indifferent to it. (...) Now why does one mast become a jalali, another a jamali, another a mahbubi, and so forth? Everyone has to pass through innumerable lives. If one man, who in his past life lived in an environment of strife and great activity, becomes in this life a mast, he is of the jalali type. If another, who led his past life in a quiet village, or was perhaps in a dull and idle environment, becomes in this life a mast, he is of the jamali type. If in his previous life a man was a bachelor, who may, or may not, have committed the sexual act, and becomes in this life a mast, he is of the mahbubi type. This is because the sanskaras of love for women were unexpressed in his past life, and in this life they find expression in the wearing of some part of a woman’s dress, or in acting in some ways like a woman’. – Meher Baba; The Wayfarers; William Donkin, pp. 34-35 Copyright 1988 Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust. http://sandman.npac.syr.edu:8888/Baba/nomotive.html

• ‘Dhondibua the Mast, who, when given anything for his material needs, would refuse it saying ‘I cannot bear comfort’! He would remain naked in all weather, be it in the blazing sun or piercing cold; and when a shirt or blanket were given to him by someone, he would gently but firmly reject the gift explaining that comfort did not agree with him and he could not bear any contact with it. [Meher Baba] said this was from the agony of love for God that the genuine Masts have. He went on ‘You cannot have the slightest idea of what such love means – it is an unbelievable agony that continually burns the lover, so that he is but a living fire! This Love is a gift from God, whereas God-realization is attained only by the Grace of the Perfect Master. Even these real men of God, the Masts, do not all gain God-realization – as a matter of fact, out of very many only one gets it! As Hafiz says in reference to God-realization: ‘For ages the lovers of God long for and await what but one in a hundred thousand achieves!’’ Baba went on to say that this Love such as the Masts have, is very, very rare. – Mani S. Irani; 82 Family Letters; p. 151, Copyright 1976 Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust. http://sandman.npac.syr.edu:8888/Baba/agony.html.

RICHARD: Mostly, however, the Eastern mystical ‘terms of reference’ allow for full realisation of one’s Divine identity.

ALAN: This still does not explain why some become such extremes. What do you think differs Franklin Jones from a Buddha or a Barry Long, or any others? Is it just ‘terms of reference’?

RICHARD: If the only examples of massive self-delusion were the likes of Mr. Mervin Irani (aka Meher Baba), for instance, then it could be put down to ‘terms of reference’ in that he and his brethren are immersed in a culture that supports that purview. Mr. Franklin Jones, however, being born and raised in a milieu that does not/ did not allow for deification demonstrates that the motivation lies deeper ... deep within the Human Condition. I refer to the psychic realm, of course ... an area that you have some demurral about.

ALAN: I do not know Meher Baba, who is, or was he?

RICHARD: He was, is and always will be [quote]:

• ‘... the Highest of the High, my Will is Law, my Wish governs the Law, and my Love sustains the Universe. Whatever your apparent calamities and transient sufferings, they are but the outcome of my Love for the ultimate Good. Therefore, to approach Me for deliverance from your predicaments, to expect Me to satisfy your worldly desires, would be asking Me to do the impossible – to undo what I have already ordained. If you truly and in all faith accept your Baba as the Highest of the High, it behoves you to lay down your life at His feet, rather than to crave the fulfilment of your desires. Not your one life but your millions of lives would be but a small sacrifice to place at the feet of One such as Baba, who is the Highest of the High; for Baba’s unbounded Love is the only sure and unfailing guide to lead you safely through the innumerable blind alleys of your transient life’.

RESPONDENT: You don’t speak much about the extraordinary Intelligence of the enlightened State and its Benevolence, far surpassing any human intelligence or wisdom, as I’m still in doubt about those ‘feet of clay’, I had all the practical skills very much in place.

RICHARD: The expression ‘feet of clay’ refers to a fundamental weakness in a person who appears to be of great merit ... in this context it means the incapacity to live their own teachings (as they are unliveable it is no wonder).

In what way does the ‘extraordinary Intelligence of the enlightened State and its Benevolence’ far surpass human intelligence? Can you provide some examples?

What immediately leaps to mind is human intelligence sussing out that the earth is neither flat nor at the centre of everything ... one can search through all the scriptures, of the enlightened ones over the last 3,000-5,000 years, for any reference to such basic information to no avail.

What I recall, during an ASC very early in the piece, is the impression of being all-knowing (omniscient) ... yet even then I could readily acknowledge that I did not know how to read, write, or understand any other language than the English language. For a documented instance of this: Mr. Sathyanarayana Raju (aka Sai Baba), a currently living example of being considered a god-on-earth by tens of thousands of people, required the head of one of his ashrams in the USA to submit daily reports of all that went on. This man – a devout follower – sincerely wondered why this was necessary ... seeing that Mr. Sathyanarayana Raju was omniscient and would already know every detail of what occurred in the ashram. So he wrote a letter humbly asking clarification ... Mr. Sathyanarayana Raju replied that he was checking on the disciple’s ability to record the events accurately.

Another example is Mr. Mervin Irani (aka Meher Baba) – another god-on-earth for many people – who was asked by a puzzled devotee one day as to why he was reading a newspaper. Another – more wily disciple – went and listened to the overseas weather report and came back to the feet of the master and asked him whether it was raining in New York.

I particularly mention this because of the following:

• [Respondent]: ‘... in the fourth state there is nothing more to know You have Absolute knowledge of Every thing’. (‘Verification’; 30 July 2001).

If Mr. Mervin Irani (aka Meher Baba) and Mr. Sathyanarayana Raju had lived more than five hundred/ one thousand years ago they would have been ‘flat earth’ god-men ... but because of human advances in knowledge they were able to know that the earth is an oblate spheroid circling the sun. It is all to do with the human knowledge of the material universe current to the era one is born in ... and has nothing to do with fantastical notions of having ‘Absolute knowledge of Every thing’ at all.

Nobody but nobody is omniscient ... it is this simple.

RESPONDENT: Is this the Intelligence of the species? – as I’ve compared this big ‘I’ in a poem (it seems that an experience like that upgrades your artistic expression – a proof perhaps for its affective starting point, agree?) with a matrix, a printing press for the human race.

RICHARD: The cognitive capacity to understand and comprehend (as in intellect and sagacity) which is the cerebral ability to sensibly and thus judiciously think, remember, reflect, appraise, plan, and implement considered activity for beneficial purposes (and to be able to rationally convey reasoned information to other human beings so that coherent knowledge can accumulate around the world and to the next generations) – which other animals cannot do – is intelligence in operation. The affective feelings – emotions and passions and calentures – are non-cognitive instinctually reactive survival feelings at root and, no matter how refined and cultivated the feelings may be honed to, are not intelligence in operation ... and neither is the affective faculty’s epiphenomenal psychic facility.

RESPONDENT: Have you heard of or read any books by a guy named Parmhansa Yogananda not sure if first name is spelt right but Yogananda is definitely correct.

RICHARD: Yes, I have heard of him and read some books many years ago. He was what could be described as a ‘Saint’ (‘God-Illumed’) as in fully surrendered to ‘God’ (as ‘Brahma’) ... somewhat analogous to, say, the Catholic Church’s ‘Saint Francis’ who was fully surrendered to ‘God’ (as ‘Jehovah’). An ‘Illuminated Saint’ (a devout and pious man or woman fully surrendered to ‘God’) is distinctly different to an ‘Enlightened Being’ (an embodiment of ‘God’ as according to their cultural belief). The Hindu religion allows for many ‘embodiments of ‘God’’ whereas the Christian religion (and ‘Jehovah’s Witness’) permits only one such ‘embodiment of ‘God’’. Mr. Mukunda Lal Gosh (aka Paramhansa) was not an ‘embodiment of ‘God’’ (aka ‘God-On-Earth’) whereas Mr. Mervin Irani (aka Meher Baba) was, for instance, as was Mr. Mohan ‘Rajneesh’ Jain and Mr. Jiddu Krishnamurti (well-known examples of modern-day ‘God-Men’). Mr. Mohandas Gandhi is revered by some as being a ‘Saint’ ... as is Mr. Abhay Charan De (of ‘Hare Krishna’ fame).

Here is an excerpt (from his own book) which describes his moment of awakening:

• [quote] ‘My body became immovably rooted; breath was drawn out of my lungs as if by some huge magnet. Soul and mind instantly lost their physical bondage, and streamed out like a fluid piercing light from my every pore. The flesh was as though dead, yet in my intense awareness I knew that never before had I been fully alive. My sense of identity was no longer narrowly confined to a body, but embraced the circumambient atoms. People on distant streets seemed to be moving gently over my own remote periphery. The roots of plants and trees appeared through a dim transparency of the soil; I discerned the inward flow of their sap.
‘The whole vicinity lay bare before me. My ordinary frontal vision was now changed to a vast spherical sight, simultaneously all-perceptive. Through the back of my head I saw men strolling far down Rai Ghat Road, and noticed also a white cow who was leisurely approaching. When she reached the space in front of the open ashram gate, I observed her with my two physical eyes. As she passed by, behind the brick wall, I saw her clearly still.
‘All objects within my panoramic gaze trembled and vibrated like quick motion pictures. My body, Master’s [Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri], the pillared courtyard, the furniture and floor, the trees and sunshine, occasionally became violently agitated, until all melted into a luminescent sea; even as sugar crystals, thrown into a glass of water, dissolve after being shaken. The unifying light alternated with materializations of form, the metamorphoses revealing the law of cause and effect in creation.
‘An oceanic joy broke upon calm endless shores of my soul. The Spirit of God, I realized, is exhaustless Bliss; His body is countless tissues of light. A swelling glory within me began to envelop towns, continents, the earth, solar and stellar systems, tenuous nebulae, and floating universes. The entire cosmos, gently luminous, like a city seen afar at night, glimmered within the infinitude of my being. The sharply etched global outlines faded somewhat at the farthest edges; there I could see a mellow radiance, ever-undiminished. It was indescribably subtle; the planetary pictures were formed of a grosser light.
‘The divine dispersion of rays poured from an Eternal Source, blazing into galaxies, transfigured with ineffable auras. Again and again I saw the creative beams condense into constellations, then resolve into sheets of transparent flame. By rhythmic reversion, sextillion worlds passed into diaphanous luster; fire became firmament.
‘I cognized the center of the empyrean as a point of intuitive perception in my heart. Irradiating splendor issued from my nucleus to every part of the universal structure. Blissful amrita, the nectar of immortality, pulsed through me with a quicksilverlike fluidity. The creative voice of God I heard resounding as Aum, the vibration of the Cosmic Motor.
‘Suddenly the breath returned to my lungs. With a disappointment almost unbearable, I realized that my infinite immensity was lost. Once more I was limited to the humiliating cage of a body, not easily accommodative to the Spirit. Like a prodigal child, I had run away from my macrocosmic home and imprisoned myself in a narrow microcosm. <SNIP>
‘The soul must stretch over the cosmogonic abysses, while the body performs its daily duties. When we set out later for a stroll, I was still entranced in unspeakable rapture. I saw our bodies as two astral pictures, moving over a road by the river whose essence was sheer light. ‘It is the Spirit of God that actively sustains every form and force in the universe; yet He is transcendental and aloof in the blissful uncreated void beyond the worlds of vibratory phenomena’, Master explained. ‘Saints who realize their divinity even while in the flesh know a similar twofold existence. Conscientiously engaging in earthly work, they yet remain immersed in an inward beatitude. The Lord has created all men from the limitless joy of His being. Though they are painfully cramped by the body, God nevertheless expects that souls made in His image shall ultimately rise above all sense identifications and reunite with Him’. [endquote]. (Autobiography of a Yogi (The Original 1946 First Edition) by Paramhansa Yogananda;Chapter:14:‘An Experience in Cosmic Consciousness’: (www.crystalclarity.com/yogananda/chap14/chap14.html).

Here are some URL’s of web pages dedicated to him and his message:

• Self-Realization Fellowship: ( The organization founded in 1920 by Paramhansa Yogananda to teach scientific methods of meditation and principles of spiritual living that lead to direct, personal experience of God). www.yogananda-srf.org/
• Yogananda: (Introduction to his life and links to other sites). www.meilach.com/spiritual/yogananda/yoga.html
• A Different Light: (A different light on Paramhansa Yogananda and a different view on his organization Self-Realization Fellowship). yogananda-dif.org/
• The Life of an Avatar: (Introduction to his life and excerpts from his writings). www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/9617/index.html
• Crystal Clarity Publishers: (Crystal Clarity Publishers, publishing books on spiritual living and meditation by Swami Kriyananda and Paramhansa Yogananda). www.crystalclarity.com/
• Autobiography of a Yogi: (Yogananda: Autobiography of a Yogi, the original 1946 first edition. Topics include: yoga, meditation, kriya yoga, self-realization, Mahavatar Babaji, Mahatma Gandhi, Paramhansa Yogananda, kriya, Swami Sri Yukteswar, Lahiri Mahasaya and more. Online Edition). www.crystalclarity.com/yogananda/
• Ananda: (Ananda, sharing Paramhansa (Paramhansa) Yogananda’s Kriya Yoga and Meditation). www.ananda.org/

It is always fascinating to compare religions and religious messages ... and the gurus and god-men and the saints and prophets and so on who propagated these delusions of grandeur born out of their massive hallucinations (as I know only too well from personal experience).

Oh well ... c’est la vie, I guess.

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