Where is Meher Baba Now? (Page 1 of 2)
Meditations by Francis Brabazon

He is everywhere, but only to you where you let Him be, because you can only see Him where you put Him – although at the same time He is everywhere everyone else has put Him.

He is within you, but you cannot be with Him when you are out visiting your friends The Wants. Or you are at home entertaining your relations The Desires, and the Beloved is outside knocking so softly and discreetly on your door; but you cannot hear Him, because of the uproar in your mind. And so you cannot have the privilege of bringing God into your house and washing His feet with your tears and drying them with your hair — although its for that that your growing it long – didn’t you know? You cannot be having your time with the Beloved at the same time as the time of your life or the pleasures of your miseries.

Meher Baba’s men mandali at Guru Prasad in 1969. Francis Brabazon is standing second from right.

Why are the kids herding to everything that’s “in” ? Because they are outsiders in a world they haven’t made and hope that at some “in” they will find Him. Why do they spill over from the bubble — pots of cities and hitch along the roads to nowhere? Because their hearts have told them that along some road somewhere is a little wine shop where the real stuff can be bought.

He is everywhere. But He is nowhere to you unless you put Him somewhere. Why not put Him — or just let Him be — where He has always been since the big bang of creation — in your own heart, That’s where (when it is nice and empty and clean) He will feel most comfortable and be most happy — and remain in His eternal Steady State.

Really speaking, only those who saw Him in His Man-form can be asking, “Where is Meher Baba now?” They saw Him, they spoke with Him, they touched Him. And then He was no longer there to see and speak with and touch. They were looking forward to seeing Him again soon. He had given them an appointment. But he did not keep it in His Man – form. They surely must be asking “ Where is He?”

But those of us who do not see the Beloved and speak with Him and touch Him are not asking the question, “Where is Meher Baba?” for we had not had time to confine Him to a particular place either within us or without. We had heard His name and seen pictures of Him. One day we would go to some place and see Him — He might even come to our homes. But that day didn’t come. Now He is where each keeps Him. And if we keep on serving Him, loving Him and singing His name, He will stay with us until His Grace merges us in Him forever.
The Lord is my Brother

Many of us despairing at the failure of each and every solution put forward for the betterment of world conditions and becoming more and more alarmed at the direction the world affairs are taking, become increasingly doubtful of the ability of man himself to solve the problems he himself has raised; and we tend to think in terms of some superior man, some world- messenger, an Avatar, occurring in our midst to lead us out of our night of chaos into a dawn of well being — such a person as occurred in every great period of darkness and confusion in man’s history and became the guiding light and inspiration of a new era such as the One as was Zoroaster in the dawn of a world many civilizations ago, as was Krishna and Buddha and Jesus, and Mohammed in more modern times.

It is natural to cry out in pain and seek relief from it, but we forget that if we sincerely practiced his precepts “Good thoughts,” “Good words” and “Good works” we would not be in the condition of suffering in which we are and in the position of threatened destruction which we face. When we hear that such a Man is in our midst we tend to deny Him out of fear that He might disturb even our insecurity or accept Him as one who will save us from further pain and establish us in better conditions or grant us bliss or liberation. So those of us who accept are nearly as selfish as those who deny.

We forget that He is also our brother. The world is the stage of His divine play on which He does not appear in the role of a Saviour and bestower of boons, remaining aloof from the rest of the play as a spectator merely approving, encouraging, correcting, condoling and rewarding the efforts of the players; He involves Himself with us in the play as the intimate actor within each of us — as the Hero within our hero, the Heroine within our heroine experiencing with us the entire action of the play, our playing becomes the means of our becoming conscious of our real brotherhood in each other and of our ultimate destiny of God-consciousness or Self–realization. God as author of the play is our Father but God as Avatar at the same time is the holder of the thread of our lives and our fellow-player.

The Lord is our brother.
This is how the greatest of the saints like Chaitanya and Tukaram in India and Francis of Assissi in the West approached and taught others to approach God — not as saviour, but as a brother, an intimate friend without whom one could not live.
All our troubles and problems in this modern world of ours are traceable to two things: our neglect of our brother in life and our making him our Lord.

To neglect our brother is the inhumanity of being indifferent to his condition — that he is starving while we eat, that he is shelterless while we have comfortable houses. Apart from the hardening of our sensibilities that this inhumanity causes, its foolishness is obvious as it always rebounds on us in the form of disease, economic upheavals and war.

From the experience of the results of the inhumanity have arisen the “humanist” movements of revolution and reform. But from recognition that our brother is our brother we have gone on and elevated him to the position of being our Lord. Man, which includes our brother and ourselves, becomes our God before whose altar all our energies are poured out in service.

Our brother can never become our Lord nor we our own God. God can and does become us, and our Lord becomes our brother. In our confusion and fear we cry out to the concrete God of our own creating or to the dim God handed down by religion to save us from the folly of our selfishness instead of realizing that He is our brother, and as such, welcoming Him in selfless service.

The Avatar is our eternal Lord and play-fellow. He loves the play He Himself has created. He loves our playing of the roles of this play and He loves playing with us in these roles. When we realize this, our fears will vanish, and there will be no saviour to seek — only our Brother to serve in surrenderance and joy. In this surrenderance we will discover that our brother in life is our brother, not our enemy and competitor or means whereby to obtain more and more of the world’s goods and in this realization there will occur the dawn of a new humanity in which “Good thoughts,” “Good words,” and “Good works” will be the normal commerce among men.