MEHER BABA ON SUFFERING
Jamshed Mehta, the mayor of Karachi, told Baba he found himself surrounded by difficulties with no immediate solution. Baba told him,
This is not bad news, this is very good news. You are lucky to have so many hardships. The fact is that there are no hardships, because everything in the world is one big zero. I see and experience this every moment.
Once tested by the Avatar or Sadguru, the devotee will feel as if he is about to die. It is terrible. This Path of God is the harshest and most insurmountable thing possible.
Still, don’t worry and don’t lose hope. Good times are ahead, and after these difficulties, quietude and comfort await you. Terrible suffering is a sign of happiness and peace to come. Great heat denotes the coming of rain. Great suffering and intense sorrow indicate that happiness is about to dawn.
Anything beyond your capacity will necessarily change your capacity, because so long as everything is within your limits, you don’t know what is beyond them. And everything concerning God and God-realisation is beyond limit. So in this way great suffering and being plagued with terrible problems are beneficial.
People pray to me to solve their difficulties, saying that they love me. But there is a vast difference between love and prayer. In Persian (the expression) to pray means to beg, to want, to desire something, even the blessings of God. But when a person really loves, he gives himself over to his beloved completely. This is true love. In that there is no begging, no wanting, and no room for desires. Only the longing to unite with the beloved remains.
Love means the renunciation of the self. Prayer means selfishness, no matter how high the prayer may be. So there is a vast difference between when one prays and when one loves.
July 1931,
Karachi,
LM4 p1374
Suffering is the keynote of the spiritual life.
Sadgurus and the Avatar never avoid suffering, either their own, or their Circle’s, by doing miracles. They suffer themselves, and let their Circle suffer too.
4 August 1937,
on board the ship Strathanavar
en route from Bombay to Marseilles, LM6 p2199
Service to the Master is an ordeal which tries the body, mind and spirit. The body suffers, the mind is tormented, but the spirit of the selfless servant of the Master experiences the bliss of true satisfaction.
7 August 1937,
on board the ship Strathanavar
en route from Bombay to Marseilles, LM6 p2199
Real healing is spiritual healing, whereby the soul, becoming free from desires, doubts and hallucinations, enjoys the eternal bliss of God.
Untimely physical healing might retard the spiritual healing.
If borne willingly, physical and mental suffering can make one worthy of receiving spiritual healing.
Consider mental and physical suffering as gifts from God, which, if accepted gracefully, lead to everlasting happiness.
Meher Baba,
c.1952? PL p31
God is equally within us all, and we must love him. When we realise him, all our suffering comes to an end. And for this we must love him in every walk of life. Love (for God) is best expressed when we give happiness to others at the cost of our own happiness. My blessings.
—-
Rich or poor, great or small, man or woman, everyone is under the spell of some sort of suffering. The relief for every kind of suffering is within ourselves. If we try to live honestly, act honestly, think honestly in every walk of life, under all circumstances, and if we try to put our wholehearted faith in God, that relief is found.
We are already the possessors of infinite power and happiness, but it is our way of life that keeps us from enjoying the eternal treasures of God.
1 November 1953,
Dehra Dun
two separate messages,
GG4 p158, 160
Another version of the second message: MD p15
Blessed is he who is forsaken by friends, cut off by colleagues, and ridiculed by relations, for the sake of love for God.
Nothing counts in this illusory world, where even your own self forsakes its own precious form.
What really counts is your unfailing devotion and faith in God, the love for God.
Meher Baba,
August 1955,
Satara
letter to W. D. Kain,
ML p105
In the divine scales, vice and virtue are necessary experiences man goes through before attaining the supreme balance of Self-realisation, which is beyond all opposites, good and bad.
Good is like a clean mirror that reflects the image of God. When true knowledge is gained, you realise that the reflection is the image of your own self, the God that is in all and in everything.
Bad is like the dusty particles that accumulate and hide the image of God, until the mirror presents only a distorted or blank surface. It cannot affect the object being reflected; it merely distorts your vision.
Love is the cleanser that wipes the mirror bright, and enables you to behold with increasing clarity the indivisible entity that permeates all life.
The negative experience of the bad, with its consequent suffering, ultimately disgusts man, and leads him to the positive force of good, thus awakening divine love. Hence the saints of the present are the sinners of the past. In the clarity of the understanding and knowledge they have gained, they show true humility. They do not take pride in their achievements, nor condemn the ‘sinner,’ whom they know to belong equally to God, but help him to remove the self-created veil of ignorance and perceive his true identity.
Man cannot escape his glorious destiny of Self-realisation, and no amount of suffering that he passes through on the way to it can ever be too much. After the apex of suffering has been reached, the time will soon come for mankind to have a deeper spiritual understanding, bringing it closer together in universal love and brotherhood in the bond of divine knowledge – the only knowledge worth having.
Meher Baba,
1956,
LB p49-50
Ivy Duce: Why should misery perpetually exist on earth, in spite of God’s infinite love and mercy?
Baba: The source of eternal bliss is the self in all. The cause of perpetual misery is the selfishness of all. As long as satisfaction is derived through selfish pursuits, misery will always exist.
Only because of the infinite love and mercy of God can man learn to realise, through the lessons of misery on earth, that inherent in him is the source of infinite bliss, and all suffering is his labor of love to unveil his own infinite self.
1956,
Myrtle Beach,
LB p52-53