Spiritual Birth

                               Meher Baba

If the world of form is only an illusion in reality, and if

its harvest is such a rich one of misery, then why should

its experience be required of the soul?

Life in the world of matter is an unavoidable phase in the

progress of the individual, inasmuch as it provides the

field for action. Action is the expression and therefore the

focusing of the mental and emotional impressions (sanskaras)

which impel the individual. As the individual acts, other

motivating forces incompatible with that momentary effort

are withheld.

Action is the paramount means through which the individual

exercises discrimination in choice and adjustment between

the many claims exerted upon his consciousness. Action also

links a large number of individuals together through the

innumerable karmic ties which have arisen out of past

service and bondage. The material world offers the necessary

environment for this interchange and interdependence.

On one hand these karmic ties trap the mind in a complex

web. On the other hand they facilitate collective life with

all its opportunities for exercise of love, sacrifice,

service and mutual help. Through the negative lessons of

hate and malice, as well as the positive lessons of love and

service, the individual finds himself compelled to

participate in collective effort. The mind's seeming

isolation is continually invaded by the life-streams of

other minds, ultimately enabling the individual to abandon

entirely the illusion he had entertained of being separate.

Thus he gradually comes to realize the unity of all life.

In spite of the suffering entailed, experience in the

material world of action is thus not without compensating

value. It constitutes a necessary phase in purifying the

consciousness of the mind from all illusion in order that it

may be transmuted into the consciousness of the soul.

One sees then that the material and spiritual worlds of

lower and higher illusion play an irreplaceable role in the

divine game, which has as its goal that man shall become

consciously aware of his own divinity. The positive values

derived from the divine sport in illusion cannot be

harvested without simultaneous collection of the residual

by-products of the coming-to-consciousness, termed

"impressions" or "sanskaras".

A newly constructed building is not considered to be really

completed until the debris of construction has been cleared

away. Similarly the fully developed individual consciousness

is not available for union with the Divine until these

residual products have been cleaned away and there is left

only the completely untrammeled, unitary nature of the

individualized soul, now fully conscious of self. As

discussed earlier, in the processes of both sleep and death

the individual returns unconsciously and briefly to the

beyond-beyond state of God. In it the soul achieves

refreshment before it returns first to the subconscious

state of ordinary dreams or the intense subconscious state

of heaven or hell, and then to the ordinary conscious state

of wakefulness or reincarnate life.

The individual cannot remain in the beyond-beyond state of

God for long for very important reasons. The goal is to

achieve the full awareness of consciousness, which is fully

achieved when all of the residual impressions have been

dispelled.

Full consciousness is achieved in the first human form, but

remains captured, so to speak, by the residual impressions,

which continue to exist regardless of the waking or sleep

state of the individual mind. It is as if they continued to

stand as the unpaid balance of the price of consciousness.

It is due to the standing impressions or sanskaras that

individual consciousness must return again and again from

oblivion to square its account with illusion, in illusion.

However consciousness must eventually disengage itself from

enmeshment in the material realm of action, for in the long

run all activities of the worldly man are like the movements

of someone on the surface of the ocean. He develops some

knowledge of the ocean of life through those activities, but

only as much as is obtainable through exploration on the

surface of the ocean. The time inevitably comes when he

wearies of surface-wanderings and makes up his mind to

plunge into the depths of the ocean of life.

Thereupon he becomes deeply concerned with the riddles of

"whither" and "whence", and this fact constitutes his

spiritual birth, by which he is eventually ushered onto the

path.

LISTEN, HUMANITY, pp. 153-155, ed Don E. Stevens

Copyright 1982 AMBPPCT