A Story of the Manifestation
by Jim Auster
Source: http://jimauster.blogspot.com/
Many years ago I asked Baba what would happen in the Manifestation. What I was shown was beyond the scope of normal dreams, imagination, and conscious or subconscious thought. Avatar Meher Baba’s life work was gloriously fulfilled “beyond imagination and conception.”
We each interpret personal and collective experience in our own way. At least subjectively, as it applies to myself, I have every reason to believe the future is revealed either in actual fact or in overall effect. This story is shared in the hope it may be helpful and relevant to others in understanding their own experience.
The gap between the capacity of words and the super-conscious reality of the experience was too frustrating and discouraged writing a credible account. Not accurately recording and communicating the most wonderful promise and most serious warning of this message has been a burden of unfulfilled responsibility. I can only try my best and leave the rest.
In 1979, while trying to understand Baba’s Manifestation, I became sick and tired of my thinking. In an uncharacteristic moment of sincere renunciation and surrender born of wholehearted disgust with my mind, I thought, “I give up! Show me! Instantly, my mind was stopped and I was given an experience of egoless bliss. After awhile, I fell asleep into a dream much more real than ‘reality’.
In the dream, I am still in the same blissful state, but, now, in the midst of worldwide upheaval, I see an overall view of general chaos and the accelerated deterioration of conditions. All normal aspects of life fail, leaving only hopelessness, helplessness, and desperation.
Natural disasters overwhelm nature and the environment. Widespread conflicts prevail and political systems cannot keep order or serve man’s needs. The world economy bursts like a bubble with financial, industrial, transportation, and communications systems ceasing to function. There is no food. Science, technology, and medicine have no solutions. Social structure collapses on all levels. Religion offers nothing against universal anxiety and desperation, and normal human values are dominated by fear driven panic and selfishness.
Our everyday world and everything we normally rely on for our existence is stripped away and exposed as transient illusion, worthless and useless. God’s support and forgiveness that sustains the world from our mistakes no longer holds back the storm-tide of the full consequences and manifestation of ego and ignorance. A global wave of ego and ignorance rises up, reaches its peak, and breaks into the ultimate expression of man’s selfish indulgence – nuclear cataclysm with all the bombs exploding everywhere. Utter hopelessness and helplessness and universal despair leave absolutely nothing left to cling to, except God.
Only when facing death do people truly surrender and seek God’s help, and only with the imminent end of life on earth is humanity at large ready to receive and accept it. The climax of global catastrophe has set the stage for Baba to reveal Himself universally, directly, and personally to each individual as the Avatar, the One in every heart.
In the greatest miracle ever Baba transforms the destructive energy of all the exploding bombs into Divine light that wipes out ego mind and purifies the world. There is a universal awakening as the all-pervading light penetrates everyone and everything to annihilate our limitations and mental impressions. Everyone, regardless of past life, personality, or spiritual development, is given freely and unconditionally this most glorious and unimaginable gift of Bliss. It is the beginning of a glorious new world and new life.
Nuclear bombs are going off everywhere but, most incredibly, the world is saved from destruction and there is no death, physical damage, or suffering, just the Light. The ego and ignorance of the world, not the world itself, are being destroyed. Liberated from mental bindings, humanity experiences Bliss, direct personal contact with the source of Truth, and the power of unlimited Love.
This Gift from God brings everyone 99% of the way, but we must give the remaining 1% with 100% effort. To hold on to the Bliss and be able to survive and live in this blissful new life, there is one condition. We must follow literally Baba’s simple instructions: “Don’t worry. Be happy. Enjoy the Bliss. Rely only and solely on God for everything.”
Each individual is given a huge push along the spiritual path. The gift of advanced consciousness gives tremendous motivation and inspiration, but the ability to hold on to it is dependent on one’s degree of preparation. If love, remembrance, and longing for God are not already established, the Gift is not appreciated, understood, and accepted. Remaining impressions cause a reversion into normal thought patterns, desires, and behavior. If the command to be happy and not to worry is disobeyed in any way by concern for material things and yielding to normal thoughts and desires, instead of focusing God’s Gift, we lose the Bliss, lose consciousness, and do not survive. Consciousness that still identifies with the limited ego is wiped out along with the universal cleansing of the ego-mind.
God’s hands are outstretched offering each one to be freed from limited ego for the perfect happiness and conscious experience of Divine love on one hand, or, on the other hand, to cling to ego and pass away along with the destruction of the ego into the unconscious oblivion of the Beyond. We are given a clear, absolute, black and white choice that no one is fully prepared for. There is no middle ground or possibility of compromise. Reverting back to normal consciousness is to lose the Bliss, lose consciousness and lose existence itself.
It is necessary to walk a fiery sword edge not to worry and to enjoy the bliss while surrounded by total upheaval and the imminent threat of falling. The desperate situation tempts the mind to renew its hold on consciousness with concern over external conditions. Yielding to the mind, like a short circuit, breaks the connection to God and, simultaneously, one’s connection with this New Life. To survive requires holding on to Baba, and nothing else.
The path is perfectly clear, balancing on the slippery tightrope of Divine consciousness while the limited mind, a loaded gun to the head, can instantly destroy everything. The ultimate drama is played out to the end between bliss or fear, everything and nothing, light and darkness, God or ego, real life and real death, consciousness and unconsciousness. The choice is entirely ours.
The miraculous Gift of Bliss imparts to everyone, regardless of their preparation, the overwhelming inspiration and heroic strength needed to survive, but those who already try to live a life of longing for God surrender to His will and enjoyment of His love have an important advantage of the essential values and self-discipline to hold on. Consciousness that still identifies with ego attachments, in spite of the gift, is annihilated along with the ego. It cannot exist in an egoless world.
In a normal experience of death the soul retains its impressions and consciousness, and moves on to identify with a new body. This situation seems dramatically different. Those who do not hold on and do not survive leave their bodies but there is no physical pain or suffering because impressions and consciousness have been extinguished as well.
Ego and Bliss are mutually exclusive in this new reality. The absence of any possible compromise or choice of a middle ground is shockingly harsh yet perfectly loving and natural. On some level, everyone is brought to God either consciously or unconsciously.
There is a strong sense of apocalyptic consequences for a failure to hold on. It seems that if the Gift is rejected and consciousness is lost, the soul may have to return to the beginning to repeat the evolution of consciousness. Like on the 4th plane, choosing ego over God is misuse and waste of our tremendous new power and rejection of the very purpose of this cycle of creation.
As the bombs explode I can feel and see the Light going right through me and through everything, miraculously erasing ego mind and releasing consciousness to experience God. We are not to look directly at the explosions. Like the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorra, anyone who disobeys and turns to look is instantly gone.
Many people are angry and resentful and blame God that the world has shattered in order to bring us closer to Him. But it is man’s overreaching ignorance, not God, that has brought the world over the brink and it is God’s grace that saves it. By choosing attachment for worldly values and ideas, those who question the purpose and reject God’s dispensation of truth can not survive.
There is no way to describe the incomparable state of universal peace and oneness. I recall the screaming intensity of my feelings more than complete details. In the midst of external crisis, the world is in the birth pangs of a new life of love and joy, heaven on earth. This life is eternal and there is a promise we will live for a very long time to enjoy it. I have greatly enhanced insight and powers. I remember flying over the ocean to India. I can see everyone’s soul shining like the sun, a glowing sphere of pure golden light. Each individual’s body, mind, and personality appear as just a thin layer of dust or a veil over the sun. Intensely beautiful light of the soul illuminates and radiates through the veil from within.
With growing intuition of truth I become more comfortably established in this new life, but there is still the immediate and pressing need to obey and hold on without thought or worry about anything. It all ends for me when I see one of my daughters as an infant asleep on a bed and think, “I hope she will be all right, I hope she makes it through this.” Instantly, my consciousness crashes and I lose the Bliss. I die and fall into the abyss of unconsciousness, an inexpressible loss.
I had failed to obey 100%. Concern for my child’s well being, the most natural, loving, and unselfish act of a parent, is still an expression of the ego, identifying with what is ‘mine’ instead of with God. Worrying and not trusting He would take care of ‘my’ daughter has disobeyed His command. Like Dr. Singh in the New Life, I cannot stay because of a few thoughts of concern for my family.
Explosively, I awoke from the vision in complete shock and terror from my sudden loss of Bliss and fall into oblivion. Such apparent innocence of the circumstances that caused my failure stuns me with a realization of the degree of preparation and understanding necessary to obey and hold on. The most unexpected and inconceivable subtlety and clarity of this lesson is convincing proof to me of its source and validity as coming from Baba and not from my imagination. Fear of losing that blissful state shook me from complacency with a most profound, yet gentle, warning of the constant need to remember and keep focused on God or “curse the chance that is wasted.”
God’s ever-present love makes one feel safely in His ‘pocket’ in spite of our weaknesses. But, how sincerely is Baba’s call for literal obedience followed and how seriously is His constant warning heeded to “hold fast until the very end”? We are like children being guided to maturity, union with God, but the Path is not child’s play.
Whether this dream is prophetic revelation or metaphorical personal insight, it inspires remembrance and love in the present life and is a wake-up call to prepare for the unprecedented awakening that is planned, individually and collectively, for all of creation. There are awesome consequences if we are not prepared.
The reality of this experience has not faded over the years and has become more immediate to me by a growing awareness that Baba is manifesting and we are offered this gift every moment but constantly rejecting it by choosing worry and gross consciousness over happiness and identifying with the bliss of our soul, our ego life over God. It may foretell an actual universal event at some point in time, or reveal a process that is happening all the time, or both, the essential and inescapable relationship between our present conduct and our spiritual destiny.
Errors and missed opportunities are always forgiven and God’s offer is always renewed, but not, perhaps, forever. Baba’s Manifestation is the ultimate decisive conclusion that is renewed only in the cosmic cycles of eternity.
The dilemma of telling this story is the obvious impossibility of communicating, with words, the Gift of Bliss. Without direct experience, the story is easily and superficially misinterpreted as another doomsday prediction of world destruction that conveys negativity instead of optimism and portrays an uncompassionate rather than a loving God. The totally unexpected and miraculous phenomenon of Divine intervention that saves the world from destruction and liberates humanity’s consciousness challenges comprehension. The limited ego-mind and its attachment to the world will be destroyed, not the world itself.
Bliss is so overwhelming and all inclusive, it makes the suffering, confusion, and difficulties of illusion vanish like a mist in the sun. Everyone is given the chance to overcome their weaknesses and mental limitations to find God. In the end, this is the only answer to the endless problems of individual existence and of humanity in general. Selfishness and ignorance create desperate circumstances and extreme consequences, which, in turn, are motivation needed to be ready to accept and benefit from the cure. Baba teaches the infinite experience of Divine consciousness is the opposite of limited ego consciousness. They are mutually exclusive without possibility of compromise. What I saw is the application of this fact in a real life context, a tangible warning of the need to prepare for the New Life by living it now, a plea to surrender ignorance for knowledge.
I am not in a position either to justify or question this, it just happened, and I feel a responsibility to share the experience accurately and honestly. It promises that the extraordinary help of the Gift of love will give us the strength to hold on if we really want a new life of Love and Bliss. Please forgive my inability to convey that, if this story communicates just fear or hopelessness instead of hope. It is a reminder to love and remember Him more and more and still yet more, to hold fast until the very end, to rely only on God, to be happy and not to worry. These are so easy to say, so difficult to practice but, with His help, will lead us to the Goal if we do.