Amartithi

 Translated as "the Eternal Date," it was on this day 57 years ago that Meher Baba passed away, after working in silence for 44 years.  Baba once said, "Things that are real are given and received in silence."

(In My) Solitude

 Just gearing up for New Year's Eve with this old Duke Ellington/Billie Holiday tune, performed here with understated beauty by Katie Martucci and Josh Dunn.

And the Devil Knows What

 A snippet of a new polka (or "polska" as they say) by the Danish folk trio, "Dreamers' Circus," whom I love.  Beautiful, isn't it?  Enjoy this brief passage as the fellows in the trio continue to work on the song.

Rainbow Connection

 I don't know how I stumbled upon this one.  A Kermit the Frog song originally written by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher, played here by real people -- Katie Martucci and Josh Dunn -- at what looks like somebody's unassuming dining room table.  There you go -- real music by real people. 

"God's A Different Sword"

 A song by the Folk Bitch Trio, performed for the Stephen Colbert show.  I love how vague this is.  Sometimes the more elusive truths of life are better expressed by skirting around them in just this fashion. 

Trust

 I'm not very inclined to trust and perhaps I am not alone in that characteristic.  Be it by our own original nature or through the betrayals of other human beings, fallible as they are, or merely through the incessant pounding and apparent opposition of life itself, we perhaps all experience some measure of loss of the ability to trust as time goes by.

I do have an instinctive trust in fate, as it were; that it will all work out in the end.  However, I don't mean that I believe my life will go as I wish, or even that my life will be in any way happy.  I mean I have a sure sense of faith in the inevitable culmination of my destiny, in a future that may be so far and distant as to be beyond my ability to conceive.  You may call that naive; I call it an instinctive faith in either divinity or simply life itself.  

I work with children.  In doing so, I attempt to provide them with a sense of safety, fun, assurance, and the nearly always unwelcome guidance in their interpersonal interactions with their peers.  I try to create an atmosphere where they feel secure and are willing to take chances and explore.  

I feel life, or God, or divinity, or destiny, fate, or what have you -- does that for me as well, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.  Despite the losses and heartaches of life, I persevere.  I'm stubborn that way.

Here's a little statement by a seeker named Don Stevens who voluntarily affiliated his life with the spiritual figure Meher Baba.  Don's talking in more depth about what I'm trying to convey and he's more articulate than I am, so I'll let his message speak for itself.

But I must say, what Don is really talking about, between the lines, is love.

SENSE OF
SELF-DETERMINATION ANNIHILATED

Don Stevens

 
Sooner or later, each human being must be willing to annihilate for a time his own sense of self-determination in a sense of absolute trust of another*. Only in this manner can there be the opportunity to comb out the snarls of countless accumulated actions in one's nature.

Even when a person is unhappiest, he still has a persistent sense of unconscious hope that his own deliberated actions will one day lead him to success and happiness. Usually it is only the person who has almost entirely ceased to hope who is willing to take the conscious step of annihilating his own ego in the person of another. For in annihilating his ego, he denies the very core of the "right" of free-will, of self-determination, and in that destruction there is bound to go his most stubborn, ego-centered hope for the future.

Once it is gone, he is really at sea. There is no landmark, no point of reliance or help, only that cause or person to whom he has perhaps by now given his allegiance. This is a frightening position and it is no wonder that most people would prefer to trust their own fallible but "visible" sense of self-determination, rather than surrender it to another's possible whims.

There are few people who have reached either such desperation in the successive traps of life, or enlightenment in the inner processes of the heart, to be willing to trust their fate implicitly to another being.

---

*Trust in or identification with another human being is not peculiar to the follower of the guru. It has its modern counterpart in the relation of patient to psychoanalyst, of friend to trusted advisor, of one who loves to the beloved. Such a relation apparently involves a very fundamental principle of nature in which the complexities of self can be attacked at their root only through the loss or lessening of "self" in the being of another.

 

LISTEN, HUMANITY, pp. 232-233, Meher Baba
Narrated and edited by D.E. Stevens
2004 © Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust

The 100th Anniversary of Meher Baba's Silence

Avatar Meher Baba kept silence from July 10, 1925, until he passed away on January 31, 1969.  Baba gave many messages regarding his silence and its import.  But perhaps the simplest explanation was when he said that he knew one day he would have to break his silence, so he began keeping it.

What does that mean, to “break his silence?"  What significance could that possibly have for any of us?

There are several cosmologies that depict the beginning of Creation as a spoken “Word” or, you might say, a vibration.  It is my understanding that this is what Meher Baba intended to convey when he referred to “breaking his silence."  He was referring to the impetus that begat Creation and stating that it would be renewed or  "re-uttered."  What would that look like?  How would we experience that?  I have no idea.

Even so, I offer this deeply esoteric message from Meher Baba on the meaning and import of “The Word.”

 

God in the Beyond-Beyond state

          is likened to a soundless, shoreless Ocean.

The “whim” of God for knowledge of Himself (“Who Am I?”)

          manifested as sound.

 

This Oceanic Sound

          is of God and is God

          and contains, and is

          His experience of power, knowledge, bliss.

 

The emergence of this sound

          through what is called the “Om-Point,”

          or its creative utterance,

          produced the worlds of Mind, Energy, and Matter.

This Primal Oceanic Sound

          is the root of all forms

          and creatures

          and men,

          and they are continuously connected with it

          and derive their life from it.

 

When one closes one’s lips and expresses sound,

          an “m-m-m” is produced.

 

This “m-m-m”

          is the foundation or ground of all spoken words

          and contains all feelings

          as when it expresses pain and anguish

          or joy and happiness,

          or all thought when expressed during thought,

          and is capable of containing

          the whole of a question and its answer.

 

This “m-m-m”

          is a drop of faint sound of the Oceanic Sound:

          the “M-m-m” or “Word” of God,

          separated from the Ocean by seven shadows of separation.

 

If the whole physical universe was a huge bell,

          the sound of it in comparison

          with the sound of the Oceanic Sound

          would be as the furthermost point of audibility

          of an ordinary bell.

 

This sound-drop is not different

          from the Oceanic Sound;

          it is that Ocean and can never be anything but Ocean –

          but it experiences itself as a drop

          because of separation.

 

This separation is not a separation by division,

          but a separation through impression.

          (As words are expressions of this drop-“m-m-m”

          separated from the Oceanic “M-m-m” –

          so are sense-actions, expressions, and experiences

          removes from Oceanic Experience:

                   seeing and seen from Oceanic Sight,

                   hearing and heard from Oceanic Hearing,

                   smelling and smell, taste and flavor, touching and touch

                   from corresponding Oceanic Faculties.)

 

 

This Original Oceanic “M-m-m”

          is called Brahm-Nad (Sound or Word of God)

          or Unhud-Nad (Limitless Sound or Word).

It is continuous

          and is the eternal Root and continuous Cause

          of all causes and effects.

It experiences

         All-power, All-knowledge, and All-bliss.

But the drop “m-m-m,”

          although of the same substance

          and not in any way different

          from the Oceanic “M-m-m,”

          and although continuously connected with it,

feels – because of its separation through seven shadows of separation –

          most weak,

          most ignorant,

          and most unhappy,

          even though at times it asserts

          strength, knowledge, and happiness.

 

In this present age

          when words,

          through accumulation and accretion,

          have become meaningless,

          and all my previous words in the form of precepts

          are neglected and distorted,

 

I maintain Silence.

 

When I break my silence and speak,

          it will be this primal Oceanic “M-m-m”

          which I will utter through my human mouth.

 

And because all forms and words

          are from this primal sound or Original Word

          and are continuously connected with it

          and have their life from it,

          when it is uttered by me,

          it will reverberate in all peoples and creatures,

And all will know

          that I have broken my silence

          and have uttered that sound or Word.

 

The effective force of this Word in individuals

          and their reaction to it

          will be in accordance

          with the magnitude and receptivity

          of each individual mind.

And the reaction will be

          as instantaneous and as various

          as the reaction of people in a room

          through which a cobra suddenly and swiftly passes,

 

          when some would nervously laugh,

          some lose control of their bowels,

          and some feel great courage

          or reasonless hope and joy.