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
