This story appears in the book Toward an Interior Sun: Awakening by a Master, and the Difficult Journey toward Discipleship. In this collection of short stories, Max Reif digs deep to offer an entertaining and insightful account of this arduous spiritual trek. The tales lead the reader from epiphanies of youth, to the life of a spiritual seeker, to a deepening awareness of the maturity required for true discipleship. Learn more about the book.
1.
I first encountered the name Meher Baba while walking to breakfast with an acquaintance at college in Sarasota, Florida in early February, 1969. The friend was carrying a newspaper, glancing at it as we quietly walked. Half way to the cafeteria, he said, “Here’s an interesting article,” and proceeded to read a brief story on the obituary page. The piece went something like:
“There was a man named Meher Baba, who lived in India and did not speak. He maintained for many years that he was God, and would break his silence before he died, and he died yesterday, January 31, 1969.”
My emotional response to those words was a kind of whimsical delight. That someone, somewhere in the modern world would either claim he was God, or maintain silence—let alone both, briefly lifted the quotidian veil, somehow. Before long, however, the name Meher Baba faded from my mind.
2.
The context for that “first hearing” described above was the cyclonic 1960s and its blast furnace of intensity, some of which I describe in the other stories and essays in this book. In spirit, “the sixties” as a vortex of energy replete with new possibilities and some peril, lasted for me from spring of 1967 until sometime in the ‘80s.
In the late ‘60s, many of us were too young or immature to know the stakes. I had read books by famous authors like Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts, extolling the wonders and insights that a psychedelic trip could convey. I ended up being among those who played Russian roulette with chemicals that I really had no business messing with. When I think now of how immature my judgment was at that age and the complications that early trauma had created in my psyche, it appears that I really didn’t have a chance.*
Hearing Meher Baba’s name coincided with my plunge into the psychedelic world, eight times in all, to try to to heal my life up till then. These plunges were into a deep pond which seemed to contain a Golden Key that I had lost. Each effort to recover it failed, although it sometimes appeared briefly that I was on the way to success.
The period also coincided with my 21st birthday, the coming of age alluded to in the title of that story—and with my expulsion from Sarasota’s New College. Both events took place within two weeks of that memorable walk to breakfast.
My mother keened on the phone when I told her of my expulsion, like an Irishwoman who’d lost a fisherman son to the sea. I didn’t feel consciously devastated, however. I felt I was moving toward something: a fellow New College student had offered the use of her family’s land and farmhouse in upstate New York for an experimental community—a commune, as we called them. I felt this was my logical next step. Finally, away from meddling parents and university officials, I believed I could “create, 24 hours a day.”
3.
I left New College in March of 1969 in a drive-away car with several friends, on what was their, but no longer my, spring break. It was my first cross-country drive and my first time in California. It was all deliciously planned, this Grand Tour, to circle back for a quick visit with my folks in Missouri, followed by the move to the farm.
By far the most poignant irony I’d ever experienced was a growing awareness, as I neared our “utopia” waiting outside of Ithaca, that my mind was proportionately shutting down and refusing to cooperate. Psychedelics had brought up deeply buried emotions I had been defending against since childhood. I was raw. My mind, it seems, was doing for me what I could not or would not do for myself, removing me from this unbearable nakedness by shutting me down completely.
Instead of realizing utopian dreams in the six months I spent at the farm, I became “a living dead man.” I tried to isolate from the other residents by putting a mattress down in the old milk room of the barn and making it “my room,” leaving the farmhouse where everyone else lived. Finally, my parents came and begged me to come home. I vehemently refused.
One day not long after they left, though, I realized how deeply I was mired and that nothing would ever change if I stayed. I admitted defeat, caught a Greyhound, and became, for a year, my mother and father’s child again.
4.
The condition of living in the family home was that I see a psychiatrist once a week. I believed my case was hopeless, that the drugs had done something to my brain that was beyond repair. However, there was nothing to lose by complying with the request, and in fact it bought a year frozen in time, with my parent more or less in the capacity of caretakers, that I look back on with great tenderness.
After a couple of months of “talking therapy,” Dr. Wolff, the tall, gaunt psychiatrist, told me, “You are not responsible for your problems. You have a chemical imbalance. We will treat you with antidepressant pills, and we will keep trying different ones until one works.”
Everybody today is conversant with “chemical imbalances” and various brand names of antidepressants, but in those days, few had even heard of any of these things. Secretly, I didn’t even really believe the doctor. How could my “chemical imbalance” just happen to coincide with the horrendous things I’d experienced on LSD? But again, I went along because there was nothing to lose.
One day one of the pills worked. It was quite sudden. Instead of being afraid to leave the house without my parents, unable to think of anything to say to anyone, I was filled with energy and confidence. I marched into Dr. Wolff’s office and proclaimed, “Out of the ashes we rise triumphant!”
With all the energy from the pills pumping into my system, I seemed to soon exhaust the possibilities of my home city, Saint Louis, Missouri, even though it was holiday season and many friends were home from college. I decided to go visit old friends from my first college, Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois near Chicago. There I had gone through a phase as a political radical (some of this period is covered in the story, “The Incident”), but the end of a love affair had wounded me so badly that I did not want to go back for my junior year and had transferred to New College.
5.
With my new energy, which seemed to keep streaming no matter what happened, I enjoyed the 300-mile drive from St. Louis. On a street near campus, I ran into a girl I’d known. She invited me to stay in the apartment she shared with a friend, and also mentioned, “By the way, Ellis is back in town!”
Ellis Pines was the radical leader at whose Student Power election rally I had climbed onto a large boulder on campus and told my story of being roughed up by Campus Security. Ellis had been elected student president. A few months later, however, he had received a letter from the university, saying “You are disqualified from taking office because of a summer school course you didn’t complete two years ago.” Disillusioned, Ellis had left Evanston. Six weeks later my roommate and I, with whom he had stayed for awhile before leaving, had received a postcard from him written on a beach in Mexico. It said only, “Truth is metaphysical, not political.”
The next thing I’d heard about Ellis was that he had somehow become connected with Meher Baba, the spiritual figure whose name I’d heard several more times since that day at New College, and one of whose books I had even perused, to little avail. After informing me of Ellis’ return, my female friend added, “But you don’t want to have anything to do with him. He works in an advertising agency now, and I saw him on TV selling laundry detergent!”
That telegraphic description, coupled with the image I’d had of him from before, created a picture that did indeed encourage me to give my old friend a wide berth. How had he possibly changed so much in two years?
In the next two weeks, I visited all my friends in Evanston except for Ellis. Practically every place I went, my host or hostess would point out a Meher Baba book in the bookcase that Ellis had brought by. However, instead of discussing Meher Baba, we would go on talking about Ellis and his recent eccentricity.
One morning, shortly before I intended to leave Chicago, the ringing telephone wakened me from a strange dream. The dream had uncannily been more vivid than waking life, something I had not even been aware could happen. It seemed to tell in symbols a version of my life story that frightened me, with “the Tribe,” the organization of athletic lettermen at my high school, marching into the locker room where I was sitting, and beating me into unconsciousness.
I did not have long to consider the dream right then, because one of my female hosts was nudging me and saying, “You have a phone call!” When I put the receiver to my ear, I heard a voice say, “Hi, this is Ellis! I heard you were in town, and am happy to hear that you’re doing well.”
I immediately felt disarmed by his genuine, friendly tone. There was no eccentricity about it, only simple humanity. He went on to invite me to stop by the advertising agency where he worked to say hello before leaving town. I did not feel in the least bit anxious, replying that I’d love to.
6.
The next morning I took the El train downtown to the Prudential Building, where my friend worked. I caught the elevator to his ad agency on the upper floors. Notified by the receptionist, Ellis came out to the reception area and embraced me. Then he led me down a corridor and opened a doorway into what was the tiniest private office I’d ever seen.
There were a desk and two chairs in the office—no room for anything else. One of the chairs was behind the desk, the other in front. I sat, of course, in the latter. As I faced my friend, I noticed that behind him on the wall was a large poster on yellow newsprint paper. A man’s face, in a black and white photo, looked out from the poster. The man looked to be in his twenties. He had long straight hair, a feathery moustache, a wisp of beard and the loveliest soft, clear eyes. Under the photo in large capital letters were the words:
I AM THE ANCIENT ONE.
Below those words in smaller letters, the poster read:
“I was Rama,
I was Krishna,
I was this one,
I was that one,
And now I am Meher Baba.”
Suddenly I realized that sitting in front of me was someone who could tell me more about this unusual man whose obituary had been read to me for no understandable reason on a misty Saturday morning two years before.
“Did Meher Baba really say he was God?” I heard myself asking spontaneously.
“He says everyone and everything is God, but there are very few who are fully conscious of that Divinity and who therefore are really able to guide others.”
“Why shouldn’t I follow Christ or Ramakrishna?” This question, too, erupted out of my mouth. It included the names of two spiritual beings I had recently begun reading about—Sri Ramakrishna having been a great Master who had lived near Calcutta in the late 19th century.
“Baba said he’s the Avatar,” replied my friend. “He said he returns to Earth approximately every 700 to 1400 years, whenever people forget what we’re all really here for. In recorded history, he said he had come as Zoroaster, Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed.”
He’s naming the greatest figures in history, I thought. I was experiencing a curious phenomenon. Questions had been coming to my mind as naturally as though I were following some kind of script. And yet my words were totally spontaneous. Furthermore, each time my friend answered a question, or more accurately, told me Meher Baba’s answer, I felt lighter. White birds seemed to be flying upward from my head, so to speak, with every round of our conversation.
This process now stopped. My mind and the room were silent. Maybe this Meher Baba was a really great man, the voice of my thoughts went on, but if he died two years ago, what’s the difference? As that thought emerged, a very subtle presentiment came with it, that something might happen now. That was odd. My sense that “nothing can happen through mere conversation” had led, a couple of years back, to my more dangerous, pharmacologically-based efforts at transformation.
”Where is he now?” I blurted out, looking at Meher Baba’s picture and not even realizing I’d been about to speak.
I waited for Ellis to answer. Silence. In a little while, I looked back toward him. He was smiling. What about? He in fact had practically the widest grin I’d ever seen. I remembered seeing him grinning that way once back in our college days, scruffily dressed, high on LSD and gleefully handing a $5 bill to a beggar, this young man now sitting before me wearing a suit.
And then, suddenly, I felt it, too, the—Love! This was Love! Not Romantic Love, not Platonic love with a small “l”, but Divine Love! I’d read of it recently in Thomas Merton, in Ramakrishna and His Disciples, but without much idea what the authors were saying. This was God!
The room overflowed with Divine Love! The force, the Being, was invisible, yet more real by far than anything I’d ever known. It felt “pink,” somehow, although visually I discerned no colour. “I am Meher Baba,” it seemed to be saying, silently. It was a distinct personality; and yet also included my friend and me, and everything else. Words like “past” and “future,” “me” and “you” had no meaning—only this timeless, all-embracing Love had ever existed.
How had I never before felt what was clearly the only essential fact of all existence? How had I failed to notice Meher Baba, who was and had always been, the Being of my own being, the Self of all?
How long my friend and I sat there, embraced by that divine smile, I don’t know. But when I left that room, as it says in a poem I penned several years later: “I searched a different search and sang a different tune.”
Postscript
I left that room 45 years ago. Not too long after, I quit taking the antidepressant pills because although they supplied energy, I no longer felt they really balanced me the way my doctor had said. I no longer believe pills can accomplish that herculean labor, although I can’t judge anyone’s use of whatever seems to help, even temporarily, in this difficult life.
I had a girl friend by then, and came to feel that in some subtle way, the pills made it impossible for me to bring my true, vulnerable self to our relationship. I took myself off them, thinking “Baba will take care of me now.” But I had karma to reckon with, and spent the next year and a half in a black hole before Light returned.
I don’t want to romanticize my life since my initial profound experience of Meher Baba. Such an experience, resulting in conviction about the Master’s status, is colloquially known as “coming to Baba.” Adi K. Irani, Baba’s longtime secretary, spoke of conviction as “God-realization in disguise.”
However, living a life of literal obedience, as Baba asks those who love Him to do, has been compared by His close disciple Eruch Jessawala to walking on fire. I don’t feel I’ve been completely successful at that, this lifetime. I would describe myself as a spiritual amphibian climbing out of the seas of ignorance. In my ignorance, I’ve had some very difficult periods after coming to Baba. What is noteworthy, I feel, is that I’ve been able to recover and go on. Baba said, “All suffering is your labor of love to unveil your real Self.” When I look back on my life and all the joy and beauty that has come into it, as well, I believe, as what seems like “progress” in the sense of gradually increasing personal and social integration, I feel incomparably Blessed!
_______
* When I think about the psychedelic period of my life, and also Meher Baba’s warnings about the dangers of these drugs, which I did not read until after my own breakdown (Baba also, by the way, acknowledged the psychedelics could be therapeutic in cases of mental illness and alcoholism, under proper supervision), it occurs to me that it is possible my own experiences were necessary in the process of battering down ego-defenses caused by early trauma that might never have had a chance to emerge consciously for healing, had my life not unfolded just the way it did. This is only speculation on my part, however.
Baba also said once, “Whether it was good or bad, if it brought you to Me, it was good.”
*****
This story in a way continues in another piece that was published in TMW by this author. This one is called “Happy Re-birthday To Me: a personal essay”. It is about the healing of childhood shame that “ripened” and came more to the surface of the author’s consciousness, five years after the events above took place. Some might not consider the later episode a “Meher Baba” experience. As a soul, the author believes that Meher Baba, who had once said in the 1960’s about Ram Dass, aka Richard Alpert, who was the “midwife” for the next stage of the author’s healing: “Richie is Mine.” The author felt what he calls “Baba” present during the contact he had with Ram Dass. It was the work of “soul reclamation”, which continues in the author’s life.
***
Both of these stories appear in Max’s book, Toward an Interior Sun, published in 2016 by The Mindful Word and still available on Amazon in most countries, in both paperback and kindle editions. The book is subtitled “Awakening by a Master and the Difficult Journey Toward Discipleship.” The book details the many and sometimes extreme ups and downs of the author’s life both before and after the events described above in this essay. It is now more than 50 years since the author “came to Baba” and the relationship still seems to be going strong, and to meet the waves and troughs of life, no matter how high or deep they are–though often not in the manner the author imagined!
