Book Details
- Title: God Speaks
- Author: Meher Baba
- Genre: Religion, Spirituality, Sufism, Worship, Devotion, Politics, Social Sciences, Eastern Philosophy
- Length: 348 pages
- Publisher: Dodd Mead
- Publication Date: January 1, 1997
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GOD SPEAKS by Meher Baba ‘The Theme of Creation’
God Speaks – Synopsis
God Speaks is Meher Baba’s most complete statement of the process of Creation and its purpose. This recent reprinting maintains the contents of the 1973 revised edition while presenting the material in a new style. A contemporary format makes the work attractive and easier to read for today’s audiences.
God Speaks incorporates all of life into a spiritual saga. The only protagonist is God, and his story encompasses all individual biographies. It is God himself who becomes the three basic processes for the growth and transformation of consciousness: evolution, reincarnation and involution (the spiritual path of return to Himself).
The first phase of God’s journey is evolution. It is initiated from a totally unconscious God as if an infinite Ocean were in a state likened to deep sleep. This unconscious God speaks the First Word “Who am I?”. This question disrupts the limitless, undivided, absolute vacuum, and its reverberations create individualized souls, compared to drops or bubbles within the Ocean. By speaking the First Word, God establishes the process of Creation, in which he assumes evolving forms to gain increasing consciousness.
Individuality is the vehicle of this quest. Evolution marks a series of temporary answers to “Who am I?” The soul traverses a multitude of forms, beginning with simples gases and proceeding slowly through inanimate stone and mineral forms. These early evolutionary stages obviously have only the most rudimentary consciousness and cannot provide a satisfactory answer to God’s original question.
The original query thus provides a continuing momentum for the drop soul to develop new forms each with greater consciousness, including the many plant and animal beings. Every evolutionary kingdom reveals new dimensions of consciousness and experience. Each also offers opportunities to gain different kinds of awareness. For example, when the soul identifies itself with varied species of fish, it experiences the world as a creature living in water conversely, as a bird, it enriches its consciousness by flying through air.
When the drop soul finally evolves to human form, consciousness is fully developed, but an individual is still not aware of the potential of his or her consciousness.
So the original “Who am I?” imperative persists and inaugurates the second phase: reincarnation. Since consciousness is fully developed, there is no longer a need for evolving new forms. The individual’s experience, gathered in early stages of evolution, is now humanized and expressed in countless lifetimes. The impulses gained in sub-human forms can play themselves out in the broader context of intelligence, emotions, choices, diverse setting and interactions with people.
But obviously no single lifetime can bear the burden of “humanizing” the entire evolutionary inheritance randomly or simultaneously. There must be a method for re-experiencing the pre-human legacy in manageable segments. The soul thus experiences alternately a series of opposites, organized according to themes. Accordingly, in different lives, the soul becomes male and female, rich and poor, vigorous and weak, beautiful and ugly. Through exploring the potential of these many opposites, one eventually exhausts all possible human identities and, therefore, has fully learned the entire range of human experience.
Here begins the third phase: involution, the process by which the soul returns to the full awareness of the Divine Force, which created him. As Meher Baba puts it, “When the consciousness of the soul is ripe for disentanglement from the gross world (the everyday world of matter and forms), it enters the spiritual path and turns inward.”
Like evolution, involution has certain states and stages, consisting of “planes” and “realms.” But individuality continues along this spiritual path. In fact, the book quotes the Sufi saying “There are as many ways to God as there are souls….”
Each new plane denotes a state of being that differs from the states that proceeded it. The first three planes are within the subtle world or domain of energy, “pran.” There follows the fourth plane, the threshold of the mental world, where misuse of great power for personal desire can lead to disintegration of consciousness.
The fifth and sixth planes represent true sainthood, which is understood to be increasing intimacy with God as the Beloved. On the sixth plane, the mind itself becomes the inner eye that sees God everywhere and in everything. “The loving of God and the longing for His union,” says Meher Baba “is fully demonstrated in the sixth plane of consciousness.”
The seventh plane marks true and lasting freedom. Impressions go. Duality goes. The drops burst and again become the Ocean. God answers his question of “Who am I?” with “I am God.” The Infinite has returned to the original starting point. He now knows, however, with full consciousness and full awareness that he was, is and always will be infinite. And he realizes that the entire journey has been an illusory dream, the purpose of which is the full awakening of his soul.
Yet the saga is not necessarily over. Meher Baba indicates that even among God-realized souls responsibilities within Creation may differ. Most play no further active part in Creation. But a rare few make the journey back to human consciousness. Of these, five become Perfect Masters, blending divine consciousness with awareness of all beings in evolution, reincarnation and involution. These five administer the affairs of the universe. And they use their “infinite knowledge, power and bliss for the progressive emancipation of all in the field of illusion.”
Meher Baba differentiates these Perfect Masters, who are always on earth, from the Avatar, who is the “that highest status of God, where God directly becomes man and lives on earth as God-man.” He further comments that the “Avatar is always One and the same, the eternal, indivisible, infinite One who manifests Himself in the form of man as the Avatar, as the Messiah, as the Prophet, as the Buddha, as the Ancient One, the Highest of the High.”
A little over a year before the first publication of God Speaks, Meher Baba officially declared himself to be that Avatar claim that amplifies the meaning of the title. To the one who accepts Meher Baba’s position, God’s plan is revealed vividly through these pages.
Editorial Reviews
From the Inside Flap
No other work has yet been published which takes the reader so deeply into the fundamental mechanics of life and the universe. God Speaks is a minutely detailed description of the journey of the soul from the time of its “creation” until it has completed its function in the evolution and involution of consciousness, and has returned to the Over-Soul from which it originated.
The flowering of each stage in the developmental pattern is described from several standpoints; and the characteristics and difficulties of certain key steps along the way are considered in detail. In reading God Speaks one has the sense of an unlimited breadth of viewpoint in which the teachings of all the great world religions are literally brought together “like beads on one string.” The special knowledges of each are incorporated into a comprehensive description of the goal of Creation, and certain basic misunderstandings of the teachings of the Messengers of the ages are deftly corrected, so that a consistent, fundamental pattern of the origins and destiny of man emerges.
Students of philosophy and religion will find much material which is entirely new or which had previously been advanced only in very fragmentary form. With precision and lucidity Meher Baba clarifies and defines formerly diffuse concepts. Regarding evolution and consciousness, he says, “It is well to remember always that the beginning is a beginning in consciousness, the evolution is an evolution in consciousness, the end, if there be an end, is an end in consciousness.”
On concluding the volume, one is left with the conviction that, regardless of the mechanism by which it may have been accomplished, truly the voice of God has been heard.
From the Back Cover
Only a God-realized being has the knowledge, the depth and acuity of insight to author a book such as God Speaks on the purpose of Creation and the goal of life. Meher Baba was that rare one among perfect ones who appears whenever a world crisis is at its height and whose role is to set the world on a new direction in a new age. From February 25, 1894, until January 31, 1969, the Saviour of mankind again walked this earth. The Messiah, the Christ, the Avatar, the Buddha, the Rasool of God was again among us in human form as Meher Baba. This statement cannot be intellectually proved, nor is it made to establish a claim. The greatness and significance of Meher Baba can only be measured by the stretching of the inner self of those who are attracted by the impact of his life and teachings.
Throughout his lifetime, Meher Baba’s headquarters were in western India, often near Poona or Ahmednagar. Although access and contact were difficult by Western standards (especially with the permanent residence of later years at Meherazad), this was not isolation. Long periods of seclusion alternated with extensive world travels. His contacts with notables and with the unknown were extensive. In a crowd, his dynamic nature drew all eyes toward him. His charm and appeal to all who came near him were universal. For his devotees, he changed every facet of their existence. They would rearrange their lives so that they could be with him on those rare occasions when he held darshan or sahavas. His silence, which he observed voluntarily since 1925, did not impair communication. “In the past, I have given you enough words,” he said, “the time has now come to live them.” Up until late 1954 he used a board with letters of the English alphabet mounted on it, to which he pointed. That is how he dictated this book. After 1954 he used hand gestures, where were read out by disciples.
Meher Baba did not come to establish a new religion. “There are enough of these,” he said. He came to awaken us. The task for the individual is to live his religion in practice, by working on himself and by serving others not to convert or change others to match his own views. Throughout his life, Avatar Meher Baba was the living example of his motto “Mastery in Servitude.” This is emblazoned on the tomb where his body now lies buried atop Meherabad Hill.
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Author Bio
Meher Baba, also called The Awakener (born February 25, 1894 – died January 31, 1969), was an Indian spiritual master who said he was the Avatar, or God in human form, of the age. Beginning on July 10, 1925, he observed silence for the last 44 years of his life, communicating with his disciples at first through an alphabet board but increasingly with gestures. He observed that he had come “not to teach but to awaken,” adding that “things that are real are given and received in silence.”
God Speaks - WritersPayItForward
God Speaks incorporates all of life into a spiritual saga. The only protagonist is God, and his story encompasses all individual biographies.
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