Meher Baba, A Tower of Baba Babble

[This is my just-posted at Amazon one-star review of "God Speaks" by Meher Baba.]

The title of this book is a gross misnomer. Meher Baba wasn’t God, and he wasn't an Avatar; he was a fogged-out mystic who couldn’t articulate a clear and comprehensive spiritual Dharma. While his convoluted and Byzantine Sufi mysticism will bedazzle the esoterically challenged, the cognoscenti will dismiss his labyrinthine ramblings and schematic scaffolding as a “Tower of Baba Babble.”

This book is so bad, I could literally compose a 1,000-page tome deconstructing it sentence by sentence. And if a Baba believer or basher wants to offer me, say, a 100 grand, I’ll gladly drop my multiple other projects and focus my literary efforts on elaborating the problems with “God” Meher Baba’s spiritual Dharma. But since I’ve yet to receive even a sniff of such an offer, and this is necessarily a delimited review, I’ll just pick out some of Baba’s babble, and point out the errors.

Meher Baba writes, “Most souls have gross impressions; some souls have subtle impressions; a few souls have mental impressions; and a few souls have no impressions at all.”

The truth is, all impressions (samskaras) are mental, stemming from volitional formations that result in mental predispositions that concatenate and“sprout” as habit-energies (vasanas). But Baba has nothing to say about vasanas, or the “mechanics” related to the formation or undoing of impressions. Moreover, all souls have impressions, but in the case of a realized sage, they are no longer binding. If Baba and other gurus had no impressions, how could they think and write?

Baba continues: “Souls with mental impressions through the mental body or mind, in the mental sphere experience only seeing, and this seeing is the seeing of God. Souls having no impressions, through the Self experience the infinite knowledge and infinite bliss of the Over-Soul.”

So, according to Baba, if you’ve got mental impressions, you’ll see God, but if you don’t, you’ll experience the Over-Soul. This is so bad, it doesn’t even merit a comment.

Baba informs us that, “The soul that has experience of the Over-Soul does not experience the gross world; nor does it experience the subtle world, nor does it experience the mental world.”

If Baba and other gurus didn’t experience these worlds, they wouldn’t be able to tell us anything about them from their “enlightened” perpective, hence Baba must not have been enlightened.

Baba writes, “The gross, subtle, and mental world are false; they are zero, imagined and vacant dreams… Time and space exist only in imagination.”

If this were so, how can one “see God” via unreal mental impressions? As Kashmir Shaivism, the foremost Hindu spiritual Dharma, makes clear, the phenomenal world is phenomenally real, and not an imagination. If this phenomenal world were a mere imagination, then why would Baba bother writing unreal books for unreal disciples in an imagined world?

Baba avers, “For instance a Qutub or Sadguru cannot and will not fall ill and when he appears to have fallen ill it is just his ‘acting of illness.’” What nonsense. For example, when Ramana Maharshi was dying from cancer, his pain and suffering from the disease was clearly evident to all. In fact, Swami Satchidananda, who was staying at Ramanashram at the time, said he had to leave because he couldn’t bear to witness Ramana’s suffering.

Anyone who buys Baba’s balderdash is welcome to it. As for me, unless someone comes up with a 100 G, or so, I don’t plan on wasting a single moment more considering Baba’s babble.