I had been having a particularly challenging week at work and the level of stress was beginning to burst at the seams. So many little things kept building up and I found almost every moment of the day felt like my skin was on fire - I just could not find peace of mind. This was taking a toll on my home life and my heart hurt even more that in all of this, Baba seemed so far away from my heart throughout the week - which was unusual considering all the online Baba meetings I’ve been part of lately. There just was what felt like a thorn in my heart, and through it bled insecurity, shame, rage, discomfort, and what seemed to be a major disturbance in my home life: PTSD. Memories kept surfacing and it honestly felt like I could not run from the hauntings of my mind which blurred my conscious vision.
When finally my day off came, I did my best to to sit and listen to Jeff Wolverton’s reading of Effort and Grace live on Zoom. It was helpful to hear others share their experiences and thoughts on the Avatar. Suddenly, I found my eyes could not stop reading the material and I muted everyone on the meeting so I could focus. Darwin Shaw wrote about “First Cause” and “Resting in First Cause” (pg.80-81 in book) and I suddenly found my eyes closed and my mind slowed WAY down. My breathing became more natural, the tension in my shoulders melted, and it was as if I’d just walked upon a beautiful and quiet willow tree next to a still pond. Such spaciousness and peace. As I opened my eyes and read the next line, it read: “And while abiding at the level of First Cause, we may experience clarity of consciousness, peace of mind, and even bliss.”
I appreciated being in such a beautiful and spacious place after such an intense mental hellscape for so long (honestly even a moment spent in that space is too much!), however I now became very aware of a sharp thorn-like object in my heart and the pain became unbearable in an instant. I took a larger photo of Baba and looked directly into His eyes, desperate for any relief. Words of shame and turmoil, hopelessness and grief cried out to my Beloved.
Within a couple minutes of this, I intuitively felt Baba ask me to open my eyes and look at Him. My body froze and all the air left my lungs in a gasping exhale- and the feeling of a splinter being pulled from deep down in my heart shot out my body. I shuddered as my mind and body tried to find equilibrium from the shift. Then Baba showed me through an internal Film with wordless words that I was like a magnetic yo-yo in Baba’s hand. The view was from outerspace looking onto Earth and Baba flung me from the atmosphere of earth into outer space, and that was like when I experience chaotic and turbulent states of mind. And the mind being like a magnet for other thoughts, when He’d throw me out into space, this magnetic yo-yo would collet tiny, tiny fragments of magnetic dust - but the longer I stayed out in space the more magnetic dust would collect on this yo-yo until it was a massive ball of chaotic, magnetic dust(thoughts).
It was only when I made an effort to remember Him and cry out for Him, that Baba would pull the string and bring me back Home to Him, or closer to His orbit. I recall in that moment asking Baba if the string was strong enough to pull me back or if it would ever break, and Baba said no it can never break; it is an unbreakable connection.
By the time I came back to the room and consciousness of my surroundings, the Effort and Grace meeting had come to an end but a few people were left saying their goodbyes. I wiped the tears and turned on my video to say hello to Ruth Appel, a wonderfully generous and strong-hearted person. She mentioned it was nice to see me and asked how I was and I told her it had been a hard week for me but that sometimes I feel like a yo-yo being thrown out into space by Baba. Just a very brief sentence or two in order to give her a metaphor I had just experienced. As we spoke I felt relatively calm and composed until in such a tender-hearted way Ruth said, “You know Alan, Baba gave a metaphor for how we were like yo-yo’s and described that he threw us farther and farther and brought us closer and closer until we became One with Him.” To say that her words brought confirmation of Baba’s unfathomable Knowing is not enough. In that moment all those quiet, internal moments where I questioned whether I was really hearing and feeling Baba, all that doubt - felt held in His Arms. I felt held like a baby that could cry into it’s mother’s chest, could finally stop pushing and pulling trying to find a way out of all this...could finally Rest in Him.
He ever so personally and ever so sweetly answered my call to Him.
I had been a spiritual seeker and earnestly looking for any way I could "heal" for several years. Going from vipassana meditation to native American shamanic practices, I stripped away all I could that bound me to any falsehood. And for those years I found much help in those practices and experiences but always felt something was missing.
In the summer of 2016 I met Adrienne, and the first thing I noticed stepping in her apartment in Oakland were pictures of Meher Baba in almost every room. She had showed me a photo of Him in the car the first time we met and I instantly knew He was a Master. To what extent, I didn't know at the time, but I stared into His eyes for what seemed like 30 mins.
It felt like peering into the eyes of an old friend as His smile brought one to mine. It was a tranquil experience but to be honest I didn't think much of it because I had spent time before looking at pictures of Saints from India and experienced similar feelings.
In the next year of Adrienne and I dating I would be doing my daily tasks and see Baba's image constantly...and this got me to wonder...who is this Meher Baba really? In all the studies I'd done on Indian Saints and Gurus I had never come across His name, or image once! Was He a fraud and my girlfriend an unfortunate pawn? I needed to know.
I kept looking at His photos and read Wikipedia but couldn't find a scandal or bad rep to His Name. This intrigued me more.
So I began to dig through Adrienne’s bookshelf and came upon Discourses Volume II.
As I began to read, I felt an unshakeable pull and the experience of an energetic "download" occurring instantly. I KNEW His words were the Truth and I couldn't find anything I disagreed with on any page I scrolled through. It was a book that was crafted by a genius of the Spirit and I knew there was something for me to learn.
All this while, an indian Master named Neem Karoli Baba had been in my life for several years. I had had a spiritual awakening listening to Ram Dass in my early 20’s and felt my Heart awaken meditating on pictures of Neem Karoli Baba. Many a great feverish moment of utmost pain and suffering had I dropped down to my face on the floor in prostration begging for mercy and help.
As the days and weeks went on, I read more and more of the Discourses and plunged into the material. I thought, “Well if this Meher Baba said these things He must have some truth to Him. I still don’t know what my relationship to Him is though.” I was not however, consciously seeking Meher Baba as a guide or Master. I was simply interested in the Discourses and appreciated the spiritual topics discussed. One day my girlfriend (Adrienne) got invited to play music at a Baba event in upper New York called the Northeast Gathering and invited me to come. I hesitantly agreed. I wasn’t sure about being around a bunch of “Baba lovers” when I only was just beginning to read His material.
After a long drive with a wonderful man named Pauli from landing in New York, we arrived in a community center near Yonkers surrounded by lush green hills and trees. People greeted us warmly but I felt a little distant until one man named Charles Haynes approached me with the warmest of smiles. I was in line in the dining hall picking out slices of bread from a table covered in condiments.
“Hello there, I was told that you are Adrienne’s partner. Wonderful to meet you, my name is Charles, Charles Haynes”. I shook his outstretched hand. It was cool to the touch, and I felt a soothing energy and smiled back.
“Nice to meet you. My name’s Alan. This is my first time at a Baba meeting.”
His sharp blue eyes eased my tension. He seemed unexplainably familiar.
“Oh that’s wonderful. Well we’re glad you both made it! Would you like to sit together for lunch?” His attire looked sharp, as if he was going to a business meeting.
“Sure, I think Adrienne is already seated over there.”
We walked over to the long table covered in red and white checkered tablecloth. I wanted to sit there because it was in the right side of the room and closer to the tall windows outlooking the green trees and fields beyond. Charles had met Adrienne before so they caught up. I was dipping my bacon in a sunny-side-up egg when suddenly a question popped up in my head. When there was finally a pause in their conversation I said, “ Hey Charles, may I ask you a question about your opinion on God?”
His quiet smile made a sudden shift in the energy at the table, and the chatter from the others at the table lulled to a halt.
“Why, yes of course Alan. Ask away.”
I swallowed my bite of bacon and said, “ So I have a sense that God is beyond comprehension, being everything, everywhere all at once. It seems hard for me to accept or understand how God could be one person, or embodied in a human, since God to me is literally every atom and molecule from earth to the farthest reaches of space. I don’t know if I can see God in one person, since many people have claimed themselves as God in human form before.”
Charles seemed to watch each word I said like he was reading a puzzle, nodding and pausing for a few seconds before he responded.
“Hmm. I think I understand the question implied. Yes, I very much agree that God is everything and everywhere.” His southern twang accented his words, “And it seems to me that in the case of Meher Baba, He is one of the faces of God in human form. But it’s a personal relationship, one that is between you and Him. Some people have such a connection while some do not. Meher Baba loves all indiscriminately.”
His words simmered in my head as the day went on. There was something about the love in Charles’s eyes when he spoke of Baba, something about his deep connection with a man I had never met that was deeply palpable. I pondered on this until the evening when Charles was a guest speaker in the main Hall. There were about 50 people gathered for the talk in the low ceiling-room, most in their mid-50s to 70s. Adrienne and I sat in the front row and I didn’t expect to hear much except a few stories of how Charles met Meher Baba in the 1950’s. What happened next not only changed the entire course of my life, but opened the door of my heart to a pool of unconditional love that continues to sustain me on a daily basis.
Charles got to a place in the story where Baba was visiting His Center in Myrtle Beach South Carolina in 1958. At 8 years old Charles lived on the Center and in this particular moment, Baba was walking past him and did not acknowledge Charles in a way that stirred him up greatly. (Please see this link to Charles telling the story, my explanation here does not give it justice! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_LH4q0FyI8 at the 30:00 min mark on)
Suddenly in a flash of instinct Charles reached out, and took hold of Baba’s sadra (clothing). He mentioned that it was totally out of his character to act in such a manner but found his heart had impelled him to reach out and hold on to Baba. He felt so much love for Baba, not because of any particular reason, but because it was spontaneous and erupted from his very soul. At this point in the story I was sitting very still and listening very intently. The whole room was dead silent and the rhythm of Charles’s voice brought up within me first a warmth in my chest, then what felt like fire and an eruption of emotion that leapt out of my soul. I began to weep so fiercely that it took me by complete surprise. And not only that, but Adrienne had also burst into tears right at the very same moment. It was a force of love I had longed for my whole life, a feeling of complete acceptance and forgiveness, like being cradled in the Cosmic arms of Infinity.
Charles Haynes in Myrtle Beach 1958. The exact moment he leapt for Baba.
I would experience in the coming weeks and months a powerful remembering; a deep-seated feeling of coming back home to myself through the love for Meher Baba in a series of dreams, visions, meditations, and synchronicities. This familiarity with a man I had not met in this lifetime was perplexing, but brought absolute significance to my life. As Baba states in Discourses Volume II, page 94:
“The relation between the Master and the disciple is often carried on from one life to another for several reincarnations. Those who have been connected to the Master in past lives are drawn to him by an unconscious magnetism, not knowing why they are thus drawn. There is usually a long history to the apparently unaccountable devotion which the disciple feels for his Master. The disciple is often beginning where he had left off in the last incarnation.”
One night a little while after our trip to NY, I had a dream I was walking through a vast desert with sand as far as the eye could see. I saw a black scorpion and some brush. Suddenly I began to be pulled backward, up and into the top of a closet shelf then into a dimly lit room sitting in a chair. The sun was out but the cream colored blinds were closed. The interior looked retro, from the 1960’s.
A man was sitting in a chair opposite to me near the window looking toward a bed to my right. He was describing what seemed to be his worries and troubles. Suddenly in the middle of his sentence as he was saying the word “sadness” another voice, a voice more clear than I’ve ever heard, thunderously said "SADNESS". A finger pointed at the man and when I followed the tip of the finger to the face, lo and behold it was Meher Baba. As he sat on the bed he looked down at me directly making eye contact. He did not blink as he looked deeply into me, and my whole body began to quiver. It came as a shock because there I was, suspended in the crackling intensity of Truth, breathless, soundless, just vividly awake. I was looking into the eyes of the timeless, eternal One and he looked as real as anyone in “waking” reality. I’m not sure how long I looked into His eyes, but at one point I began to weep into my hands profusely. I kept repeating over and over "I thought Neem Karoli Baba was my Master". I woke from the dream in fervent tears breathing heavily with my heart racing.
During these early months of Baba slowly but surely hooking me to His Damaan, I was battling my confusion with why Neem Karoli Baba had been in my life and who he was to me now. It wasn’t till one night while staring at Neem Karoli Baba’s photo that the answer came. I had the experience of him telling me, “I have brought you to the Ocean of Love”. I began weeping not knowing what that meant for I hadn’t known that phrase to be connected to Meher Baba. I just felt an indescribable sensation that the “train tracks” were being shifted from one frequency to another.
With tears still streaming down my face I walked into the living room where Adrienne was on her computer. I went over and saw on the screen a quote from Meher Baba that read in big letters, “I AM THE OCEAN OF LOVE”. And that was it. I fell to my knees and it felt like galaxies and starlight imploded in my chest. Baba felt so physically near and I held my heart sobbing hot tears to the ground, for He was the One I knew to be my true Master.
I eventually found a passage in Discourses Volume II Pgs. 54-55, that discussed the experience of having multiple Masters in one lifetime:
“All Perfect Masters are one in their consciousness and it is absurd to imagine any grades between them. Though one Master is not greater than the other, the disciple must, for his own purposes, place the claim of his own Master over and above the claims of other Masters until he transcends the domain of duality and realizes the unity of all life…in very rare cases, owing to special circumstances, the Masters themselves might decide to share the spiritual work in relation to a particular disciple. There are, therefore, exceptional cases of disciples who have had to affiliate to two or more Masters. This is an exception rather than the rule, and where there are more Masters than one, they arrange the distribution of their work so carefully that they do not set up any conflict of claims.”
After that day I never reached out internally or externally to Neem Karoli. I didn’t think about it or question, it was just time to move forward with the God Man, that’s all.
The week after my honeymoon I developed a severe flu and lung infection. Every moment of those 10 days was excruciating physical pain but in my mind I kept hearing “Only God is Real”. I repeated that over and over as my body violently pushed everything out from both ends. Even though I was suffering I knew some how it was Baba’s Grace, I couldn’t hold on to anything but Him.
At one point I needed to get groceries from the market and so collected myself the best I could and drove to the store. I was feeling rather sad and upset and to top it off it was a very gloomy looking day. Through my sweats, chills, and delirium I kept repeating “Only God is Real”, and thought of the mandali who went through so much for Baba but still smiled and did their best to be kind to others in the midst of all kinds of suffering. Inspired, I opened my heart and forced a smile on my face and did my very best to focus all my inner attention on Baba.
Walking slow and steady and focusing so intently on Baba, I went down the flight of stairs to get to the store. As I turned a corner, a man walking up the stairs suddenly said “Hey! How’s it going man?” and extended his hand to shake. I was so focused on Baba that it felt so natural to smile and greet this person I had never met as if they were a close friend. He had such a kindness to him and I spontaneously responded, “I’m doing good, just doing my best, getting better and better”. His eyes seemed to look at me with a compassion and recognition, they were slightly squinted as if looking toward the sun. “That’s wonderful. You’re doing great man.”
Suddenly I felt a little nervous and wasn’t sure why this man was stopped in the middle of the stairs of the grocery store wanting to talk to me. It crossed my mind that he may be trying to sell me something. But I looked at him and just gave those worries to Baba in the moment. I then knew he didn’t want anything at all. He asked me what kind of work I did and told him I work with people with disabilities. He nodded his head and thanked me for my service. Then he said, “Let me guess, you are…27 years old?” and I said yes I’d be turning 28 in February. I asked how he knew my age and he giggled and said he just made a lucky guess.
We both laughed and then he said “Well it was great to meet you brother, I must go now. But keep doing what you’re doing, it’s helping a lot of people”, and with that he shook my hand. I looked him in the eyes and said, “God be with you”. With a smile he looked back with such kindness and said slowly, “God be with you”.
Now, being a very introverted person it is not usual for people to walk up to me and greet me. Actually, this was the first time anyone had ever approached me with such kindness and warmth in the general public. I had felt so alone and beaten down but the minute I made an effort to give over my suffering to Baba, He brought this kind stranger over to tell me I was doing a great job and to keep going.
Tears filled my eyes as I walked through the store. I really felt Baba was carrying me, because I barely had the physical strength to take the next step. I didn’t even have to carry a heavy box of waters because a kind clerk immediately offered to carry it for me! In these small but powerful ways, He let me know He was taking care of everything.
He loves us more than we could ever love ourselves.
It was a Saturday morning and I decided to read more from Listen Humanity Part II, titled “THE CYCLE OF SLEEP AND WAKING”. I came to a paragraph on page 125 that cracked open my heart. Baba’s love was an effulgent light filling the entire apartment living room. The passage read:
“If a person is caught in a quagmire he instinctively tries every means to get out of it, but the very effort he makes thrusts him deeper into it. The more he struggles, the further in he sinks. Help must come to him then from someone who stands on firm ground, and who can only be of help when the struggling man has ceased to struggle long enough to look about for aid. There is a certain similarity between this situation and the case of the individual who has surrendered his life to the master. The false, separative ego tries its utmost to postpone its own dissolution by resisting the divine love of the master. It struggles in the quagmire of existence, but each act of ego-affirmation invites a reaction of deep surrender to the beloved's will.”
The line, “…each act of ego-affirmation invites a reaction of deep surrender to the beloved’s will”, was like a thunderbolt of forgiveness. It felt as if everything I had done in this life, whether good or bad, even those unforgivable moments, were truly forgiven by Baba. Just to know that anything I do or have done only brings me closer to Beloved Baba helps me loosen my grip on fear and worry over every detail in life. I don’t see this as a free-pass to divulge in more and more negative karma, but it’s truly as Baba says, “Do your best, then don’t worry, be happy. I will help you”.
After having some breakfast and integrating this experience I needed to get cat litter so drove in the light showers of the afternoon. As I reflected on Baba’s beauty my eye suddenly caught sight of a quaint little church on the side of the road. Gold paint tipped the roof and stained-glass windows offered a peaceful glow to the white walls. In that moment I felt a movement in my gut; I needed to stop by the church on my way back home. I hadn’t been to church in years, but here was Baba leading the way.
Walking up the slight hill of the church parking lot, I approached the church and found two giant wooden doors. Inside, the ceilings were high and there was a speaking pew in the center of the room. I stood alone in silence and found the stillness nourishing. A few minutes later a man walked in and said, “Hey man, welcome. If there’s anything you need just let me know. I’m Father Leo.” I asked him when the church was built and he said 1934. I thought of how Baba was in New York at that time and smiled. I thanked him and said I just wanted to find a place to sit and commune. He was collecting some papers and said, “There you go. Yes sit anywhere, make yourself at home.”
I took a seat close to the wall and closed my eyes. Father Leo’s faint footsteps finally exited the giant room and the opiating silence enveloped all my senses. I was so exhausted and depleted, energetically. I opened my eyes for a moment and saw a statue of Christ on the cross and immediately tears streamed down my face. I was now sitting with Christ in my very heart, all around me, and all I could do was gently weep. Here in this small church by the road, Christ Himself took me through waves and waves of His infinite forgiveness for humanity. Buried memories and feelings of having been at church as a child surged to the surface, every good and bad moment of my life up until this moment now a hot tear falling into His Hands…was this what they meant by communion?
Father Leo came in and out of the large room, footsteps echoing. I was aware that out of all the isles he walked down, he always walked down the isle past my seat. I’m not sure how long I sat there but when I felt complete I got up and left. As I went down the parking lot hill, I heard behind me “Take care Alan!” I turned raising my right arm high and said, “God bless you” . In a curious manner Father Leo replied, “Erhm, yes…okay man, you take care now…see you again”, then after a short pause blurted, “God bless you!”
