There is only one question. And once you know the answer to that question there are no more to ask. That one question is the Original Question. And to that Original Question there is only one Final Answer. But between that Question and its Answer there are innumerable false answers. These false answers—such as, I am stone, I am bird, I am animal, I am man, I am woman, I am great, I am small—are, in turn, received, tested and discarded until the Question arrives at the right and Final Answer, I AM GOD.
Meher Baba, The Question and Its Answer, p. 78
Preface: Examining potential Angel Voices
NOTE: After I began to write this piece, the thought came to expand it to a piece of several installments about the many different kinds of voices within us. I would question the quality of those voices, and which, if any, is the real voice. That consideration led me to choose the quote above, about the voices that say, “I am this,” and finally—according to the Sage, 梅赫•巴巴—in some lifetime, discover the real answer: “I AM GOD.”
I went ahead and wrote this first installment about possible “Angel Voices” I’ve heard on two occasions.
First experience, 1974
The spark for this article began with my wondering whether to share the story of the two times I remember hearing an “inner voice” I thought might be that of an Angel. I think they were audible voices, but not necessarily in the same way an external voice is audible.
In 1974. I was living in an old wooden house a few blocks off campus, with three fellow students at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. Some events had occurred that had left the four of us, and a few others who were frequent guests, feeling deeply connected. The place was very “opened up” emotionally, somehow.
I occupied a large bedroom on the second floor. It was a kind of renaissance period in my life. I often wore sweatpants and a T-shirt around the house, and I had a very fluid course schedule: literature and creative writing courses, an independent study. The study involved reading about and creating mandalas with a dear mentor, Dr. Tom Banta. Dr. Banta was, one felt, “in but not of” the psychology department.
I had a large rectangular piece of plywood balanced on a cinder block for my work table, where I wrote assignments and journal entries and painted my mandalas. My bed was a mattress-on-the-floor affair, naturally. Life was pretty mellow—well, some of the time. Some huge internal blocks resulting from childhood trauma hadn’t come to the surface of my mind yet for reckoning—they did so a year or two later—but they were “in there” and caused me to “go away” at times.
One of my non-resident friends, while visiting me in my room one day, had the guts to say “I see thunderclouds in your eyes sometimes.” That’s enough of a snapshot of me in those days to set the stage, I think.
One morning, I awoke from sleep hearing an inner voice that said:
The voice had a “different,” other-worldly quality. It also seemed authoritative. Upon doing a scan for possibilities of categorizing it, the closest thing seemed “Angel.” Could have been God, perhaps, but that wasn’t my intuition.
It was also a sobering thought. There was the “completely covered with wings” part to cheer me! But … well, how to access them? The voice didn’t leave any clue about that! Keep doing what you’re doing, I guessed, as my life was entirely an effort to actualize the Higher Self, and had been for several years (see 《来到巴巴身边：我与梅赫巴巴43年的浪漫》).
The second time
A lot happened between my first “Angel Voice” experience and my second and only other one. The second experience was in late 1981. Once again, it’s wedged in my mind, surrounded on all sides by other tales that it’s a small part of, and here I need to once more resist the temptation to go off on tangents that are delicious in themselves!
The bare essentials: I’d been back in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, recovering from things that had taken place elsewhere. That was a theme that repeated several times in my late twenties and thirties. I’d been recovering this time from a really intense “life-crash” (that tale is told in my 2016 book, Toward an Interior Sun).
Right: a drawing of the home done by the author in the 1980s.
I’d been staying at my parents’ home, recovering from a difficult period on the road. (See Falling Off the Map: A journey to hell and back). At first, considering the intensity of what I’d been through, I was pretty listless. The therapist I started seeing said I reminded him of a concentration camp survivor who, upon release, doesn’t get better. But gradually, in the secure atmosphere of my family’s home, I began to be more active. I saw friends, began writing and painting and playing music again, and joined a weekly New Age political discussion group.
After awhile, I started feeling restless. One afternoon, on an intuition, I packed a few things into one of the family cars, drove to downtown St. Louis, and checked into a “B” hotel that I’d picked up truckers from during my stint as a taxi driver a couple of years before. I’d never really explored the downtown area, in spite of having grown up in the city. I decided that among the thousands of offices in those buildings, there must be one of them that could use a fellow like me who wanted to work.
Taking the car back to my folks’ the next day, I lived in the Gateway Hotel while looking for work in the daytime, going from office to office in the big buildings. At night, I walked the streets and sometimes went into the music pubs on Laclede’s Landing, an entertainment area build on old cobblestone streets atop a hill above the Mississippi River.
After a couple of days, I actually found some work in an office run by two eccentric fellows who told me they were “into the occult.” I have no memory what they were really doing there, professionally. I would take bundles of mail to the post office for them and do other little jobs, and the three of us would have wide-ranging discussions about spiritual topics.
During my nighttime explorations, I began to feel the 风 blowing me through those streets, guiding my path as if with a conscious intention. This continued after dark each evening, until a few nights later, “the Wind of the Word”* seemed to be blowing me out onto one of the bridges across the river, and I didn’t resist. On the bridge, I put my thumb out and got a ride deep into Illinois on Highway 70. There, I stopped at a Howard Johnson’s for dinner and then hitched farther on.
I hitchhiked the 340 miles (about 547 kilometres) to Cincinnati and spent a couple of days visiting my old stalking grounds near the university. Several days later, I hopped onto a Greyhound bus, and after the long ride through the American South, arrived at the destination I’d been heading for since the wind blew me onto the bridge: Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
it was an unmarked green wooden swinging gate with no sign.)
I hailed a taxi outside the bus station. Twenty minutes later, it dropped me off in front of the green, unmarked gate of the 500-acre Meher Spiritual Center, a wildlife refuge and retreat centre on the Atlantic Ocean, which Meher Baba had visited three times in the 1950s and which retained the fragrance of His Love in every leaf, every rock, every particle of its cabins and everything else.
I walked around the gate onto Center ground, where I prostrated and kissed the Earth, deliberately getting a tiny bit of the sandy dirt of the road in my mouth and swallowing it. It was good to be back at Baba’s (and my) “Home in the West.”
I couldn’t check in to a cabin because the registration office had closed at 9 p.m., but a friend who happened by told me a certain integral member of the community was currently on pilgrimage to Baba’s Samadhi (Tomb-shrine) in India. This fellow always left the door of the little cabin he lived in (a mile north) open, and probably wouldn’t mind if I slept there that night.
I walked up Highway 17 towards North Myrtle Beach, turned towards the ocean at the street I remembered, and easily found my way to the compound where this now-abroad friend lived. Sure enough, the door was open. I carried my duffel bag and guitar inside, closed the door again and prepared to go to sleep.
Now, on the way to Myrtle Beach, I’d been reading a fascinating book. It was a biography of my favourite novelist, Hermann Hesse, who lived in Germany and then Switzerland up through the first half of the 20th century. That plays into what happened next.
I slept like a baby, I’m sure, my first night near Meher Baba’s “Home in the West.” In the morning when I woke, I heard my second “Angel Voice” saying to me:
“Sturm und drung” was a late 19th-century German literary movement that had influenced Hermann Hesse. It romanticized Nature and was full of emotional intensity.
This “message” fascinates me to this day! I’d hitchhiked and bused 1,000 miles (about 1,609 kilometres) to go to the place where I believed one could find peac散 on Earth. I intended to life there for the rest of my life. (Note: I’d come there before intending this, and was destined to come yet again, and not “stay the rest of my life” that time, either.)
It seemed that I was being told by the Angel, or whoever’s voice it was, that no place I go on this planet is going to be an absolute paradise of Peace and Love. Yes, there may and indeed have been periods of great peace and joy, but living on Earth isn’t going to feel perfect!
The line in the Christian “Lord’s Prayer,” “Thy Kingdom come / Thy Will be done / on Earth / as it is in Heaven,” expresses a noble longing; yet, life here in this “gross realm” will fall short by virtue of the fact that everything here is impermanent, and most people and things are decidedly imperfect even when well-meaning.
And indeed, that is how things have worked out, to this day.
“The Wind of the Word” is an autobiographical poem by Francis Brabazon, an Australian poet-disciple of Meher Baba who lived in India with the Master between 1959 and 1969. The poem was published as a pamphlet with illustrations by Patricia Baker. It describes Brabazon’s experience of camping in Australia’s outback and feeling the presence of God coming to him in the wind.
The author of this article had recently read that poem. The article above details a similar experience in the life of this author, who feels that his own experience, though no doubt influenced by the reading of Brabazon’s poem, was nevertheless an authentic one in its own right.
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image 1: Max Reif; image 2: Wikimedia Commons; image 3: Max Reif; image 4: Wikimedia Commons; image 5: Wikimedia Commons
