What are the things that are considered important on the path to God-realization? And, what are those that are unimportant?
(or)
Can man become God? How?
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Which is greater- love, obedience or surrenderance?
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What is the difference between “love” and “intellect”? How come ‘love’ help realize Truth?
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What determines one’s capacity for love?
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How come ‘love’ is a GIFT? Why is it said that- receiving love requires REAL DARING?
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When will our troubles, worries and difficulties disappear?
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Are all ascetics, yogis, walis or pirs God-realized?
Answer:
(Extracted from Meher Baba’s literature, which is a copyright of Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust(©AMBPPCT), Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, Bharat/India)
To garland me, to bow down to me, and to sing my praises are comparatively the three most unimportant things. The three most important things on the path to God-realization are– love, obedience, and surrender. There is no possibility of compromise about these three.
Love is a gift from God to man, obedience is a gift from master to man, and surrender is gift from man to master.
The one who ‘loves’ DESIRES to do the will of the beloved and seeks union with the beloved.
‘Obedience’ PERFORMS the will of the beloved and seeks the pleasure of the beloved.
‘Surrender’ RESIGNS to the will of the beloved and seeks nothing
One who loves is the lover of the beloved.
One who obeys is the beloved of the beloved.
One who surrenders all– body, mind and all else has no existence other than that of the beloved, who alone exists in him
Therefore, greater than ‘love’ is obedience, and greater than ‘obedience’ is surrender. And yet, as words, all three can be summed up in one phrase– LOVE-DIVINE
One can find volumes and volumes of prose and poetry about love, but there are very very few persons who have found love and experienced it. No amount of reading, listening, and learning can ever tell you what love is. Regardless of how much I explain love to you, you will understand it less and less, if you think you can grasp it through the intellect or imagination.
Hafiz describes the bare truth about “love” when he says :
Janab-e ishqra basi bala tar-azaq’l ast;
Kasi in astam busad kay jan der astin daradThe majesty of love lies far beyond the reach of intellect;
only one who has his life up his sleeve dares kiss the threshold of love.
The difference between ‘love’ and ‘intellect’ is something like that between night and day; they exist in relation to one another and yet as two different things. Love is real intelligence capable of realizing truth; ‘intellect’ is best suited to know all about duality, which is born of ignorance and is entirely ignorance. When the sun rises, night is transformed into day. Just so, when love manifests, ‘not-knowing’ (ignorance) is turned into ‘conscious-knowing’ (knowledge).
In spite of the difference between a ‘keenly intelligent person’ and a ‘very unintelligent person’, each is equally capable of experiencing love.
The quality which determines one’s capacity for love is– not one’s wit or wisdom, but one’s readiness to lay down life itself for the beloved, and yet remain alive.
One must, so to speak, slough off– body, energy, mind and all else, and become dust under the feet of the beloved. This dust of a lover who cannot remain alive without God, just as an ordinary man cannot live without breath, is then transformed into the beloved. Thus, man becomes God!
Listen to love without philosophizing about it. None present here° loves me as I ought to be loved. If all of you had love, none of you would be left before me. You would all have realized God, and we would all have become the One which we all are in reality and in eternity.
You accept me as being simultaneously God and man, the highest-of-the-high and the lowest-of-the-low; but by accepting me to be THAT, you do not know me to be THAT.
To know me as I am, you must become conscious of my real state, and for that you must love me as I love you.
The mandali who have been with me through thick and thin all these years are fully prepared for love of me to lay down their very lives at such a sign from me. Yet even they do not love me as I love them. If they did, then they would have become one with my oneness, which in reality is the oneness of us all.
It is love alone which can lift the veil between a lover and the beloved. Believe me, you and I remain divided by nothing but the veil of you yourself.
What does ‘you yourself’ mean? When you feel hungry, you say: ‘I am hungry’. If unwell, you say: I am not well. When you say: Baba, I slept well, I am happy, My son died, They abused me, I feel miserable, Those things are mine- it is this ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘mine’ which is the veil!
It is only because of the veil of the ‘false ego’ lying between us that you find yourselves involved in so many difficulties, troubles, and worries, all of which disappear automatically when touched by the reality of love. When the curtain of your limited ‘I’ is lifted– and it can only disappear through love, and love alone– you realize unity and find me as your real self i.e., God. I say so because, it is only ‘I’– everywhere. There is really nothing like– ‘you’!
It requires cycles and cycles for one to be enlightened with real knowledge of self, or God. Therefore, millions upon millions of so-called births and deaths on your part are not sufficient in themselves to lift the veil of your limited ‘I’. It can be removed through love, though in infinitely less than a split second.
All those who are true ascetics, yogis, walis, pirs, and saints are NOT NECESSARILY God-realized. Only real lovers of God, irrespective of sex, are the true mardan-e-Khuda (men of God). Even from among a hundred thousand such men of God though, perhaps only one will become God-realized after many cycles.
Both Hakim Sanai and Moulana Rumi say the same thing in different words:
“Daor ha bayad ke ta yak mard Sahib-dil shawad”,
&
“Salha mardaan burdand intezer,
ta yakira barshud az sad hazar”.That is: “It needs many cycles for just one advanced soul to be realized; and when for many years man has longed for God-Realization, one out of hundred thousand such men of God achieves it.”
No amount of rituals, ceremonies, worship, meditation, penance and remembrance can produce love in themselves. None of these are necessarily a sign of love. On the contrary, those who sigh loudly and weep and wail have yet to experience love.
LOVE SETS ON FIRE THE ONE WHO FINDS IT.
At the same time, it seals his lips so that no smoke comes out.
Love is meant to be experienced and not disclosed. What is displayed is not love. Love is a secret which is meant to remain a secret save for the one who receives it and keeps it.
To love Baba in hopes of achieving health, wealth, betterment of family and friends etc., is to love all these and not Baba…
Love God and become God. I have come to receive your love and to give you mine, as I have already said. If you love me, you will find me. Unless you love me you can never find me.
Do not think that you can never love me or that you can find no time to love me. I often say that I want your love. I mean it because, that is all that I want from you. Therefore, I always tell you to love me more and more
I have also said that you cannot love me as I ought to be loved. To do that, you must first receive the gift of my love, and that gift depends upon absolute pleasure on my part in giving you just a glimpse of the reality of my self.
No one can possess ‘love’ by any means other than as a GIFT. But I give love to self and accept it myself. The giving of love knows no law save love, which by itself is the law which governs all other laws of nature
It is always infinitely easy for me to give, but it is not always equally easy for you to receive the gift of my love. Sometimes it is also infinitely impossible for one to receive that love. That is why Kabir says that:
“some ask for it and do not get it,
some get it unasked, and
yet there are those who are unable to receive it
even when it is offered to them”.
I am ever prepared to give the gift, but you must also prepare yourself to receive it. THAT REQUIRES REAL DARING!
Even in ordinary ‘animal’ and ‘human’ love, there are upper reaches in which a mother is sometimes negligent of her own life for the sake of her offspring. Or a man can remain without sleep or food or thoughts of lust for days due to his restlessness born of true love for a woman.
“Divine love” is the fire which not only eliminates all kinds of cold, but also all sorts of imagined heat. For example, amongst the very very few who possess such love is the mast°° known as Dhondiba at Kolhapur. Though exposed to the rigors of heat, cold and rain through all the seasons, his body remains healthy, well-fleshed and strong. The fire is burning within him unknown even to those in his surroundings. His mind has no link with his ‘body’. Love pervades him from head to foot.
Although love is beyond intellect, there are innumerable points about it which can still be explained by reason and brought within its grasp. But in finality, I remain; everything else is zero, and I am the only reality°°°. That reality cannot be reached in illusion through illusions, and there can be no hide-and-seek about love.
When God becomes man (Avatar, Buddha, Christ, Rasool), He can BESTOW both love and obedience upon and ACCEPT the surrenderance of any and all individuals!
I say all this as much to those who have been living with or for me all these years, as to those who are only with me now for this sahavas. I tell you honestly that if you obey me honestly, you will become me– your own real self.
This is not the first time I have said this. For ages past, I have been telling all to leave everything and to follow me. That means to obey me so that you may have conscious experience of me. Now is the time when those who obey me realize me.
Obedience which is greater than love– is the one hundred percent obedience described by Hafiz :
Mazan ze chuno-chara dum kay banda-e-muqbil,
Be-jan qubul kunad, her sukgan kay Sultan guft.Broadly translated, this means:
“Carry out every command of the Master without question, as is becoming to a lucky slave”!
– Meher Baba
————————————
° referring to the audience in the sahavas
°° Mast :: a spiritually preoccupied and divinely intoxicated person.
°°° Not in the sense of Meher Baba as a person, but as one who is one with God. Baba’s constant theme is that– all men are really one with God, and therefore inevitably one with all God-realized beings, and with each other as well– if they only know it.
