Dear folks of Baba,
Sometimes when I would be with Darwin, he would make surprisingly fundamental observations about the Baba community, not critical but insightful, and I would take special note. On one occasion, he happened to say, very casually, that the Baba lovers don’t seem to be content in themselves and with the world around them. He would say, “Be content with what you have and are…Be satisfied with His companionship.” This led me to ponder how poised and relaxed Darwin always seemed, whatever the outer circumstances. He appeared to be comfortable with “What Is.” Years later, when I was faced with a great conflict that I had been suffering with for a long time, I remembered Darwin’s words. At one point during this period, I happened to read a message of Baba’s that I had read many times over the years, and I saw it in an entirely different light. In His discourse on “Will and Worry”, Baba says, “When the intensity of your faith in My will reaches its height, you say goodbye to worry forever. Then all that you have suffered and enjoyed in the past, together with what you may experience in the future, will be to you the most loving and spontaneous expression of My will.” Like a bolt of lightning, it was absolutely clear in that moment that I definitely did not realize that everything which happens to me is “the most loving and spontaneous expression of His will!” I was lucky if I felt ten percent of what happened to me as loving and spontaneous.
As it happens to us from time to time in our life with Baba, the shock of His words now meant that I had to recalibrate; I had to do a radical wholesale re-evaluation of a massive part of my life with Him. At first, rather than being critical of what was happening to me and around me, I determined to at least start with accepting “what is.” I had to stop judging what was happening and be open to it as being “a most loving and spontaneous expression” of Baba’s will. Even though my emotions and feelings might be hurt by others and by life at the lower level, inwardly at a higher level I began asserting that all this is His love. Although this was not my experience, my consciousness began probing deeply into what was happening before me, with its oftentimes negativity and harshness. I contemplated the state that Darwin must have arrived at to be so accepting of life.
It was during this same time that a book came into my hands, the autobiography of Roshi Kennett, the first female Zen priest in Japan. She was British, and it was shortly after World War II when there was still great animosity felt by the Japanese toward the British. As a result, she suffered enormous persecution by the establishment of the Zen monastery, which drove her eventually to find a place within her that was unassailable to persecution. She writes of that inner achievement: “The only thing I can possibly do in order to learn anything is to accept, with unswerving faith, everything that is happening to me, believing that it is all for my good, whatever it may be. If I respond in any other way, then I shall always be saying that this person is good or that one is bad…I must see what they do as being intrinsically good at all times, even when it works against me.” Her words were an immense challenge to me. Of course, I realized that she didn’t mean that we have to martyr ourselves and tolerate abuse if we can avoid it. Some believe that God is even punishing them, but Eruch would share this metaphor: Baba is a statue (and by extension our own soul), and if we hit the statue, we can’t say that the statue is hurting us; we are hurting ourselves.
Baba helped in this overall re-evaluation process. He brought home to me one day that to be critical of others is to judge the work He is doing in each one. If He could awaken more love in someone without forcing it on them, He would already have succeeded. But, as He has said, love cannot be coerced, and even He has to submit to His own law of love. I felt compassion for the Compassionate One and His unfailing efforts to awaken us to love. In recent years, Mehera, Baba’s Beloved, brought home indelibly to me in a moment a most extraordinary truth—it is all pure love! That is, there is really no such thing as gradations of love.
Here is what Baba and observing the mandali eventually brought me to after many years. I found that it is essential that I say yes to “what is” in the moment, which keeps me fully open to what is happening, and then afterwards to consult my heart: What is it prompting me to do in response?
I feel more clearly than ever that it is really my Beloved who is playing all these parts for everyone’s awakening and ultimate good.
In His love, Jeff
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