The Sound of Bells: Meher Baba, Carl Gustav Jung and Eastern Mysticism Spiritual Progress and Psychological Blocks

By Norah Moore

This book brings together the teachings of Meher Baba and the teachings of Carl Gustav Jung for the first time. Many people would wish to bring together their inner experience of spirituality and psychological development. Meher Baba did not come to bring a new religion but a philosophy that brought all religions together.
In this first book The Sound of Bells, and Eastern Mysticism I looked at C.G.Jung's Analytical Psychology in the light of Meher Baba's book God Speaks. In the second book of the trilogy Glowing Embers for the New Humanity, God can only be Lived, I brought a more detailed account of how this might be accomplished. In the final book of the trilogy I turned to a more personal account of how I followed this path myself and summed up how the path has been followed throughout all the avataric ages .

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481793384

Norah Moore

Dr Norah Moore is a Training Analyst and was Director of Training at the Society of Analytical Psychology, London. (Jungian Training). She is also a follower of The Avatar, Meher Baba. She therefore has experience of both fields, psychology and spirituality.

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© 2013 by Norah Moore. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/08/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9337-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9336-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-9338-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013908474

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

PART 1

SPIRITUAL PROGRESS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL BLOCKS

1: THE RELATION BETWEEN PSYCHOANALYSIS & THE PATH

2: THE SPIRAL JOURNEY of ANALYSIS

3: WHAT IS MEANT BY SPIRITUAL PROGRESS?

4: METHODS

5: MAYA

PART 2

MEHER BABA’S SPECIAL EMPHASES

6: THE MASTER AS BRIDGE

7: LOVE, ITS SEED AND NURTURE

8: EGO AND ITS TERMINATION

9: SANSKARAS AND JUNG’S CONCEPT OF THE SHADOW

10: BALANCE OF HEAD AND HEART

11: POSITIVE FORGETTING

12: THE NEW LIFE

PART 3

INNER LIFE, THE PLANES AND ALCHEMY

13: INTUITION AND DISCRIMINATION

14: ENERGY

15: CONSCIOUSNESS AND INDIVIDUALITY

16: THE PLANES OF THE PATH AND ALCHEMY

17: INNER LIFE AND THE PATH

18: INCARNATION, THE BODY AND THE WORD

APPENDIX

REFERENCES

INDEX TO FIRST LINES OF POETRY

CONTACTS

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The Tree of Life—a charcoal drawing by an analysand of C.G. Jung

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

SKU-000647345_TEXT.pdf It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge many debts of gratitude. First and foremost I thank Don Stevens for unfailing support and encouragement, for meticulous editing, and for personal communications from his years with Meher Baba. I also warmly thank my sub-editors Rob Ryder, Laurent Weichberger, Elspeth Milburn and Dan Sanders for hard work and good spirits. Many companions have been at my side with helpful feed-back, particularly the French Group in Marseille, Bruce Milburn in London, and Balaji in Hyderabad. Cristina Arguilles in Spain checked the translations from the Spanish; Lol Benbow assisted with the editing, with the charts and with modifications to the chapter on Consciousness. Annie Challis helped with the pictures of the Rosarium and the chart, and kept my computer going; Sarha Moore made the index. I am much indebted to several ex-analysands who have generously allowed me to make use of their analytic material. I thank Joe Redfearn, Elizabeth Urban, and Gustav Dreifuss for permission to quote from their published papers and Tom Hickey in California for personal communications. Paolo Guido allowed me to use his Bishops Crozier as an illustration. I offer all these people my deep gratitude.

I thank the following publishers for kind permission to quote from their publications:

Allen and Unwin, for The Way and Its Power;

Beguine library, for Tales of the New Life with Meher Baba;

Burns, Oates and Washbrook, for The Cloud of Unknowing, Denis Hid Divinity, and Revelations of Divine Love;

Cambridge University Press, for Poems from the Divan-i-Shams;

Companion Books for Listen, Humanity, Meher Baba’s Word and His Three Bridges, Listen, the New Humanity, and Meher Baba the Awakener of the Age;

Dodd Mead, for Man’s Search for Certainty;

Dover, for The Principle of Relativity;

Dutton, for Catastrophe Theory;

Hogarth Press, for Duino Elegies;

John Murray, for Tao-te Ching;

Mosnaim, for Innerspace;

New Directions, for Poems of Dylan Thomas;

Oxford University Press, for The Idea of the Holy;

Paraclete Press, for The Practice of the Presence of God;

Penguin Compass, for Shama el Din Mohammed Hafiz;

Reading and Benjamin, for Structural Stability and Morphogenesis;

Routledge & Kegan Paul, for Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, and Origins and History of Consciousness;

Seventies Press, for The Kabir Book;

Sheriar Foundation, for Discourses 7th edition, Sparks of the Truth, Love Alone Prevails, The Wanderers, and The God-Man;

Sufism Reoriented, for God Speaks 2nd edition, and Life at its Best;

Tavistock Press, for Playing and Reality;

The British Journal of Psychotherapy, The International Journal of Analytical Psychology and papers published by them, and Neti-Neti, for ‘Head and Heart’;

Yale University Press, for The Courage to Be;

and the Meher Baba Trust for photographs of Meher Baba.

I also thank Routledge and Kegan Paul, Lawrence Reiter and the Meher Baba Association of Southern California for permission to use several pictures.

It is not known where the real abode of the Divine Beloved is,

only this much is clear,

I hear the sound of bells from the travelling caravans.

—Hafiz

PREFACE

SKU-000647345_TEXT.pdf This book is the first of a Trilogy "The Manifestation of the Real Self, Meher Baba and C.J. Jung: The Theophany of Majesty and Beauty." It is not a purely theoretical book but is based upon my own understanding and explorations. It is addressed to anyone who questions the meaning of life, whether they belong to any particular religion or to none, and I hope it will be used by anyone seeking Reality. I write with two groups of people particularly in mind—those interested in the ideas of Carl Gustav Jung, and those who are attracted to Eastern mysticism and to following the teachings of Meher Baba.

I will look at the blocks and difficulties that may arise on the spiritual path and at psychological insights into them. My source of reference is first and foremost Meher Baba’s word, which is a bridge to God Himself, as Don Stevens explained in his book Meher Baba’s Word & His Three Bridges. Next to that I have turned to the experiences of people with whom I have been privileged to work as a Jungian psychoanalyst, and to my own life experience of the Path and of Jungian analysis. I have also had the privilege of hearing Don Stevens’ memories of exactly what Meher Baba said about several points. Don is a follower and a friend of Meher Baba, and worked and travelled with him for twenty-five years until he died in 1969. Don is also a ‘close Mandali’, as Meher Baba said about him on many occasions to Don and to other Mandali. (Don Stevens, communiqué) This means that Baba knew Don to be one of the inner circle of his followers.

My book is intended to be an account of the inner world, although wrestling with the blocks and difficulties that point one onto the Path will lead on to becoming open to what Meher Baba called ‘atomic bombs of spiritual energy’ that he said that he embedded in his words, particularly in his great book God Speaks.

God Speaks is primarily the source of this energy rather than a source of specific guidance and teaching. It is more a bridge to God than advice on how to embark on the search for Him. Its importance is as a source of spiritual energy and awakening rather than an explanation of the mechanics of Creation and the soul’s individual path through it. It is a description of the landscape rather than advice about how to tread a spiritual Path. Discourses, Meher Baba’s second important book, on the other hand, is a source of that advice and needs to be integrated with God Speaks.

My book can be seen as one person’s view of how one can link the advice given in Discourses with the landscape described in God Speaks. It is about the experience on the Path of weaving the spiritual into one’s everyday life. It links Meher Baba’s two great books, standing between them. I hope readers may be drawn to read this book side by side with God Speaks and the advice given in the Discourses (which can be seen as a practical handbook for the Path) and the second section of Listen, Humanity which are all from Meher Baba’s hand. Apart from that it compares and contrasts Meher Baba’s and Jung’s accounts of integrating the details of the way with the landscape.

Possible misrepresentation may occur as I select aspects of Meher Baba’s words and reassemble them in my own order. To lessen this source of error as far as possible, I have tried to make quotations accurate, and to give full documentation and provenance for them, so that the context may be checked and explored, if people wish to do so. Whenever I give my own opinion or write from my own experience, I will try to make it clear that I am doing so.

When I write of Jung I follow Jungian and Post-Jungian traditions, but as a Jungian scholar I neither claim complete knowledge of every detail of his life nor of every word he wrote.

—NORAH MOORE · London

INTRODUCTION

by Don E. Stevens

SKU-000647345_TEXT.pdf Both Carl Jung and the roots of my involvement with the mystic path extend to somewhere in my eighth year of life. I do not know where it came from, but one day it was there, and from the time it was there it had a curious insistence in my life that I could not explain. It was a very simple question, but even then of the utmost importance to me: What is the purpose of life? What is my purpose in life?

At that time I was not even aware of the singular fact of the existence of such a question in my mind. I told no one of its presence, and that was not that I felt it needed to be kept secret for any reason. It was just there, and I sensed that no-one I knew would be able to give me an answer to it.

By the time of my mid-teens I had encountered the name of Carl Jung through a foster aunt in San Francisco who had in some very natural manner fused me into the friendship of Dr Elizabeth Whitney, already the pillar of Jungian thought and practise on the West Coast of the United States. I was barely sixteen when, despite my own disinterest in such things, I had my first contact with mystic experience. I took both Dr Whitney and mystic experience for granted, and did not look in either direction for the answer to the question of who I was nor in what sort of cosmic scheme of things I existed. All three went along their separate ways.

Adolescence has a way of speeding up things in the inner life, and this happened remarkably quickly and naturally in my case. Dr Whitney and her vitally alive circle fitted naturally into that speeding structure, while simple curiosity led me just as quickly and surely to the doorstep of the Sufis in San Francisco in the person of Murshida Rabia Martin. I had no idea at the time that a very sure hand had guided me to two rare wielders of the Truth in short and natural order, without the slightest waste of time or confusion.

Dr Whitney and her very able associate, Dr Joseph Henderson, helped me over several fairly considerable bumps in the road of late adolescence, and Murshida Martin opened the door to what I knew instinctively was the real answer to the question that had plagued me since the earliest days of my reasoning. As I had no thought of hiding one inner stream from the other, both Dr Whitney and Murshida Martin knew of the presence and the importance of the other in my life. In this instance, however, I did find it both amazing and remarkable that neither had the slightest quarrel with the other. It was as if the two trees that grew in that garden had a symbiotic reinforcement for the other, and the two trees grew in the most complete harmony with each other.

Increasing age put a strain on the health of Murshida Martin, but not before she had found the object of years of search for the successor in her own spiritual development for the place initially held by Inayat Khan before his early death in 1928. In 1945, Murshida placed herself and her students under the spiritual guidance of the Indian mystic, Merwan Irani, Meher Baba.We soon became aware that we had new challenges to meet, in the form of his silence and his simple statement that he was the Avatar of the age. Murshida Martin clearly brought out both of these points in her original introduction of her students to the fact of the existence and position henceforth that Meher Baba, as he was called by his close ones, was to occupy in the Sufi hierarchy.

It did not take too long to resolve any lingering uncertainties I might have, as when I first met him face to face in New York in 1952, it was obvious that he was easily the greatest human being I had ever encountered. The passing years served only to confirm and reinforce that initial inner knowledge. Those intervening years also served to confirm and reinforce my original trust and reliance on the Jungian circle of friends Dr Whitney had graced me to know. The Sufi tree seemed constantly to exchange pollen and even fruit with the Jungian tree that grew at its side. The exchanges of words and concepts and inner adventure between the two worlds of thought and growth were also constantly in harmony and reinforced each other with astonishing ease. I even wrote once an erudite paper on this fact to present to my Jungian friends which was very well received, and I was very happy that my sense of the profound relationship of these two healthily growing entities in the garden of my life was so natural and productive.

After some decades of this harmonious inter-development I met for the first time Dr Norah Moore in London and found to my surprise that here was a very kindred soul who had in one fashion and another gone through a similar line of discovery of these two independent but intertwined schools of inner development. In a remarkably short time, she experienced an inner confirmation of the veracity of the path and the goal of the discipline which Meher Baba brought to the Sufi way.

A book had to be the outcome of such an invaluable experience, as well as the manner in which two seemingly independent but, in fact, closely intertwined processes, had led to a result that should be recorded and also suggested as an important way of proceeding on the inner path of Truth. I have been close to Norah’s side as work on this classic and important writing has been going along. It has been a most exciting and important development in my own inner work, and one of the most demanding efforts of concentration of my life. It is, in fact, of the same order as was the work in editing Meher Baba’s great opus, God Speaks, which I did at his request with the current head of the Sufis over fifty years ago.

I suspect that Norah’s book will achieve a similar standing and respect in the world of basic search of meaning. It is especially encouraging to me to find situations such as this, in which two great adventures are being related for their similarities and their harmonies, rather than contrasted and set out to do battle in the ancient human way.

—DON STEVENS · London

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Meher Baba shortly before his death in 1969

Merwan Sheriar Irani

MEHER BABA

1894-1969

SKU-000647345_TEXT.pdf Merwan Sheriar Irani was born in Pune in a Persian Zoroastrian family. His father was a devout Zoroastrian and his grandfather the custodian of a Tower of Silence. Merwan was a lively boy, not especially interested in spiritual things. He attended a Roman Catholic School, St Vincent’s High School in Pune, and later studied languages and poetry, particularly the Sufi poets, at the Deccan College in Pune. He was a promising cricketer. The family lived in the ancient part of Pune in one of the old houses with a central courtyard and well. When he was eighteen, as he cycled home from college, a venerable lady, Hazrat Babajan, one of the five Perfect Masters of the day, stopped him, kissed him and said, This is my beloved son. One day he will shake the world, and all humanity will be benefited by him. He was dazed by this, becoming absorbed in God. He took to his bed, unable to eat or speak, his family thinking it was a psychotic episode. He spent much time sitting in silence with Hazrat under a neem tree in the park. As he began to return from absorption in Realisation of his oneness with God he sought out the other four Perfect Masters and in 1915 was accepted by Upasni Maharaj as a disciple. He remained with him for seven years, coming down into ordinary reality. The pain of coming down continually caused him to beat his head against the stones of the well in his house, and as a result he lost most of his teeth. The pain was due to experiencing oneness with the Everything of God’s Being and, simultaneously, the pain of apparent separateness from God in Creation.

When Merwan was twenty-eight, in 1922, Upasni named him the Ancient One, the Avatar of the age. Merwan began to collect disciples around him who nicknamed him Meher Baba, or Compassionate Father. He founded an ashram, a clinic and a school in Meherabad near Ahmednagar in the Deccan and began a lifelong task of finding and caring for masts, the God-intoxicated, travelling widely through India. After the war, when a renaissance of a search for life’s meaning arose in the West, he visited Europe, America and Australia, and founded centres in Queensland and in Myrtle Beach, North Carolina and groups of followers worldwide. He was also the Perfect Master of ‘Sufism Reoriented’ in San Francisco.

Meher Baba wrote several important books on the evolution and involution of human consciousness, and the turning away from egocentredness towards desire for God’s Reality and awareness of the soul’s innate oneness with God. Among the books definitely from his hand are God Speaks, Discourses, and Part 2 of Listen, Humanity.

In 1925 Baba began a period of complete silence and abstention from writing that lasted for the rest of his life. His books were at first dictated with an alphabet board, and later through gestures interpreted by Eruch Jessawala. Baba corrected this word by word. He said he did not come to found a new religion, but to awaken men, and to revitalise all religions and bring them together as beads on one string. In 1949 Baba took some disciples on a two year journey round India, called the New Life. It was a time of simplicity and companionship with him and with each other, and laid the basis of a new way of relating to him. They endured much privation, begging for food. He undertook a period called Manonash, during which he completed the annihilation of the finite part of the mind.

He then went to America where he was seriously injured in a car accident. A later accident in India left him crippled. He spent his last years in seclusion at Meherazad, died in 1969 and is buried in the tomb-shrine at Upper Meherabad.

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Meher Baba in 1956 · greeting Don Stevens

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Carl Gustav Jung at the age of 83

CARL GUSTAV JUNG 1875-1961

SKU-000647345_TEXT.pdf Carl Gustav Jung was the son of a Lutheran Pastor in Laufen, a village by Lake Zurich. He was a strong, vigorous boy who enjoyed tussles with the village lads. He studied medicine and psychiatry in Zurich, where he later worked at Burgholzi with Sigmund Freud. Freud was exploring unconscious processes and laying the foundations of what was to become psychoanalysis. Neither had a formal personal analysis but they analysed each other’s dreams. After some years Jung and Freud separated.

This was in part due to difficulties in what had become a fraught father-son relationship, and in part due to differences in their views of the unconscious. Freud saw infantile eroticism as the pivot of complexes in the unconscious, and turned to the Oedipus complex to exemplify it. Jung, on the other hand, saw many other equally compelling factors in the unconscious, and turned to many other myths. Most importantly, they differed over the purpose and nature of the unconscious. Whereas Freud saw the unconscious as having noxious contents that it was necessary to make conscious and eliminate, Jung saw the unconscious as a treasure house, to be accessed and used.

Jung called the totality of the being the ‘Self ‘, and described centres of organisation in it that he called archetypes of the collective unconscious. These were personalised into figures among which were the Shadow, Anima and Animus, Great Mother, Trickster, and Wise Old Man. Many archetypal images clustered round these centres and could be accessed through dreams and myths, but chiefly through the dialectic between analyst and analysand during a Jungian analysis. The aim of Jungian analysis is firstly to integrate the personal shadow with the ego, and then, in a process of individuation, to develop a relationship between the ego and the more unconscious parts of the Self. Jung’s great preoccupation was with the meaning of life, and of images of the archetypal figures, in particular with images of God. He did not acknowledge any belief in God in his writing, since this would have necessitated documentation, an impossibility. His autobiography Memories, Dreams and Reflections speaks of an inner spirituality.

After Jung left Freud, he underwent a period of pseudo-psychosis, during which he consciously allowed himself to be overwhelmed by images of the unconscious. In this period much of his extensive writing on the archetypes and the Self originated. He also developed a deep interest in alchemy as a mystical and symbolic search for wholeness. Other writing is the fruit of his work as an analyst. His writing is collected in the twenty volumes of the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, now translated into English. Jung did not wish to found a school of psychology, but inevitably one grew up round him at the Institute of Analytical Psychology in Zurich. There he analysed many from all over the world who in turn founded daughter institutes in England and America. Such institutes are now to be found throughout the world. Jung himself travelled in Africa, America and India.

Jung’s personal life was complex. He married Emma, a fellow analyst, and had a family. He also had a relationship with one of his students, and they all lived together in a ménage à trois.

In his later years Jung lived quietly at Bollingen on the shores of Lake Zurich, turning to occupations such as sculpture and building. He died in 1961 at the age of 83.

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C.G. Jung with his family in 1950

PART 1

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SPIRITUAL PROGRESS AND PSYCHOLOGICAL BLOCKS

1: THE RELATION BETWEEN PSYCHOANALYSIS & THE PATH

SKU-000647345_TEXT.pdf The Spiritual Path and Analysis Looking at blocks to spiritual progress and to analysis is rather like taking a watch to the mender. My watch stops and I oversleep and miss an appointment. Perhaps I forgot to wind the watch. It may need cleaning, or the winder may be faulty. It may be something more serious: the main spring may be broken or the hands sticking or loose. These things must be diagnosed and then are easily put right. I may want or need to sleep more, or be in the middle of a fascinating dream. But some things are beyond the skills of common sense or even an expert clockmaker. Subconsciously I may not want to keep the appointment. Perhaps I am angry with the person or feel threatened by them. I may be projecting my own guilt and bad feelings onto the appointee and now blame him or her for my own shortcomings. It may be even more complicated than this. I may be unwilling to make any sort of appointment. My despair may be such that it is a threat of existential annihilation if I were even to move a finger, and the world would fall apart should I do so. I may have lost touch with the difference between the timelessness of space and the ordinary time of Creation. In fact I may be losing the ego boundaries that I need to live in the world and I may be in danger of being invaded by deeply unconscious forces. On the other hand I may be so absorbed in God that I am lost in His timeless eternity, but if that were so I would know it; the other things I have mentioned are subconscious or unconscious blocks. Or I might be deceiving myself into believing I was absorbed in God when I was merely absorbed in myself.

This analogy may be applied step by step to blocks both in analysis and on the spiritual Path, but the aims of the two processes are not the same. Their objectives are very different, although both deal with self-realisation. Analysis may profitably go hand in hand with the Path and is particularly helpful in lessening kinks in the early stages and as a preliminary before getting on the Path. The inner process of analysis is never finished and would go right on to the end when the goal is reached and a Perfect One helps the aspirant to reach it. However, it is gradually replaced by the lessons of everyday life and by taking responsibility for oneself, and by the trueing that comes from keeping nearer and nearer to Meher Baba as the Path continues.

It is worthwhile to look at the differences in objectives of analysis and the Path before going any further. Analytic work aims at bringing the subconscious and some of the unconscious into consciousness and trying to understand it. The first task in this is the integration of the personal shadow with the ego, bringing its rejected or never-lived-out contents into conscious play. To do this, strengthening of ego boundaries is necessary. Ego boundaries keep the conscious ego from being overcome by the unconscious contents of the psyche. The result is a better adjustment to life and to relationships. When this is on the way it becomes safer for the ego boundaries gradually to become more permeable to unconscious forces. The greater part of the more unconscious archetypal part of the shadow is not easily integrated with the ego, but a gradual shift takes place so that a relationship between ego and the unconscious develops rather than a polarised ego-self axis such as existed previously. The ego now experiences the tensions between the opposite poles of archetypal shadow and between the opposites of other unconscious archetypes and a process of individuation is begun in which a conjunctio or balance of opposites can begin. The goal is the opening up to the possibility of a higher interior life where consciousness is freed from the sway of the collective archetypal process and becomes more individual. In such individuation the ego is preserved; indeed, it is strengthened, although with a greater openness and permeability. The importance of understanding the inner world is lessened and the ability to not know increases, so opening up the way to exploring beyond what can currently be understood.

The objectives of the Path are quite different from those of analysis. For a start, understanding is not an objective of the Path. It is more a process of gradual involution of consciousness and arriving at the recognition of the unity of the drop-soul with God’s Reality. This unity has always been there since the beginning of Creation before the soul bubbled up from the ocean of God and felt itself apparently separated from Him, but the innate unity has been veiled from view by curtains of ignorance. Meher Baba says that the first steps in this Path are the weakening of desires and the growth of love. This makes possible the gradual thinning of sanskaric impressions or habits, accumulated during evolution and during human lives and reincarnations, and finally makes possible the termination of the ego through surrender in love and the gaining of a balance between heart and mind. The goal is to reach individualised consciousness, that is, consciousness of the soul’s unity with God while retaining its own individuality. All this is in quite a different frame of reference from the individuation achieved in analysis.

STARTING ON THE PATH Certain qualities are helpful, some measure of them being necessary even to embark on an analysis, and much of the same ones are needed for starting on the Path. First in importance would be some strength of ego, and courage, and close on this, perseverance and the ability to trust, to take risks and to be flexible. Some budding of honesty is pretty central too, although this takes a long time to expand and open. To cap this short list I would suggest spontaneity and the ability to respond to others, or at least a desire for this. And I must not omit humour. These are rather like counsels of perfection and in most cases only one or two are present and much preliminary work remains to be done before serious work can begin.

Meher Baba says that long preliminary shaking, through life experience, thins the sanskaras and starts to loosen the knots. Then the spiritual path can begin with the birth of a conscious or semi-conscious longing of the soul for Reality and to go back to the source from which it thought itself separated as from the first moment of Creation. The aspirant who has perceived the goal longs to be united with God. In fact, the longing to go back to the source is present in each being from the very time that it is separated from the source by the veil of ignorance; but the being is unconscious of the longing till it, as an aspirant, enters the spiritual path. (Meher Baba, Discourses, p. 128) Then the gift of the Path can be given. Thus the longing has always been there but latent and unconscious. What causes the emergence of the longing into consciousness? Meher Baba does not clearly say, but he does make it clear that entering the spiritual Path is not a result merely of one’s own efforts or merits.

After the experience of countless disappointments and disillusionments in life and lives, Baba says that the individual becomes restless and longs for a reality deeper than that of outward forms, and may turn to the rites of religions and to ethical and moral values. But if this is merely external conformity to what is expected by society or learned at school, as it often is, it tends to make the rites dry and weak. The individual may then become dissatisfied and move forward to becoming more interested in the inner world and to ideas about God Himself rather than in doctrines and rituals, but these ideas too can ensnare and cause a subtle egoism. The individual may then turn to unusual and unorthodox interests, countering conformity with non-conformity, but this too has its dangers, since it may make him or her feel different and separate, even better than other people. Through critical thought, a system of priorities may start to evolve between the important and the unimportant, between Real and illusory values, lasting and transitory, real and unreal.

The transition from external conformity… to the life of inner realities… involves two steps: (1) freeing the mind from the inertia of uncritical acceptance based upon blind imitation and stirring it to critical thinking; and (2) bringing the results of critical and discriminative thinking into practical life. In order to be spiritually fruitful, thinking must be not only critical but creative. Critical and creative thinking leads to spiritual preparation by cultivating those qualities that contribute toward the perfection and balancing of the mind and the heart—and the release of unfettered Divine Life. (Meher Baba, Discourses, p. 354) This all can only bear fruit when it is brought into relation with practical life, or some incident or accident may give a jolt and temporarily weaken sanskaric impressions. Then the Path can begin with a longing for Reality and to go back to the source, which is God.

From the moment of initiation into the path, the longing to unite with the source from which he has been separated becomes articulate and intense.

(Meher Baba, p. 129)

My own recollection of starting on the spiritual Path is hazy and not very illuminating. As far back as I can remember there has always been a longing for Reality and meaning such as Baba describes. I have always walked the Path under a veil and have never known, or indeed wanted to know where I was, or for most of the time known there was a Path. For much of my middle life I did not even believe in God. With hindsight I believe I possibly may have been brought back to earth at an early stage of the subtle plane, having started on the Path in a previous life or lives. So I cannot say much from personal experience about what it was like before the Path began, or the manner in which I first was drawn onto it. But I have worked with analysands who I believe stepped out on the spiritual Path while they were in analysis, or shortly afterwards. My own experience of struggling with present sanskaras enabled me to recognise what they were experiencing although I had no personal memory of starting on the spiritual Path myself.

In the example of a man who comes to mind, the beginning of the Path was precipitated by despair when an intolerable longing started to become conscious, and when an accident occurred. David was the grandson of poor, uneducated immigrant refugees to New York. He was brought up in the Bronx in great material deprivation. The only greenery in the district then was a narrow strip along the railway, and it was here he escaped by himself and dreamt his dreams of a better life, one with more meaning, and it was this longing for meaning that eventually brought him into analysis. He was bright and contrived by what can only be described as confidence tricks to get an education and go to the university. At least I had to believe he did, for he always lied even when truth would have been easier. Everything he said was a lie. He knew it, I knew it and he knew that I knew. He never stopped talking, and all lies. He came to England to escape the C.I.A. of whom he had fallen foul because of political protests. Or, again I had to believe that was so. I think there was truth in it since my own phone was tapped for some months about then and this was probably because of my association with David. He was driven by dissatisfaction with his life and was ever striving and seeking for more meaning. His days were filled with playing American football and his nights with a different girl each time. I don’t think this was an idle boast. He was stuck with this distorted, despairing reality of illusory satisfaction and containment, and with false safety in his body armour and psychological armour. He was contained in his false reality. In order to remain in touch with him and to have some hope of reaching his inner world I had to accept everything he said at face value, as absolutely true, and work with that, identify with it and thus come to hear the truth he could not bear.

One day David arrived at my rooms with his arm in plaster and his jaw wired up. He had suffered an accident playing football and broken his jaw. He could neither speak nor eat, and the girls lost interest in him. Everything fell apart for him. For weeks we sat there in silence sharing his despair and depression, which I made no attempt to lessen. He could not talk to me with his voice but I heard his inner voice speak loud and clear. As he recovered, his search for meaning became more conscious and led him to join a Sufi group and he became enthusiastically involved in this. After some months he left them because, he said, they required him to become a Muslim, but I think it was truer to say that the Sufis were more than he could face at that time. He married and had a son who was stillborn. This had a devastating but enormous effect and he subsequently matured greatly as a person. Somehow reality had caught up with him. He returned to the Judaism of his childhood and was drawn into Jewish mysticism, and I believe entered the Path then. We continued to work together and in fact I kept in touch with him for some decades. We came to an understanding that his lying was his way of hiding his vulnerable inner longings from other people. He had felt God as unsafe and out there, and out to get him if he betrayed any truth. But his longing told him that God as the Other was within and was to be found there as no Other but himself.

2: THE SPIRAL JOURNEY of ANALYSIS

SKU-000647345_TEXT.pdf The spiritual Path has often been described in writings about mysticism as a spiral journey. For instance, St John of the Cross depicts a trail ascending Mount Carmel in a spiral, each rounding of the spiral coming back almost to the place where it began, but slightly above it. (St John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel) The Path has been set out very clearly in the writings of Meher Baba. It is the road that leads from a false centring of consciousness on Creation, with me as the centre, to a gradually increasing awareness of God’s Reality as the centre, and to realisation of the oneness of the soul with God.

MEHER BABA’S VIEW OF PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESSES Meher Baba has challenging views on psychology and analysis, and often his concepts go far beyond commonly accepted standpoints and tend to turn ideas upside down. He sees analysis and deep introspection as very useful on the spiritual path in helping to resolve subconscious and unconscious problems. It is particularly useful, he says, before entering the spiritual Path and during its early stages, and also throughout its course, in bringing to light hidden conflicts that can then be realised and faced: When the conflicts are thus brought to light it is possible to resolve them through intelligent and firm choices. The most important requirement for the satisfactory resolution of conflict is motive power or inspiration, which can only come from a burning longing for some comprehensive ideal. Analysis in itself may aid choice, but the choice will remain a barren and ineffective intellectual preference unless it is vitalised by zeal for some ideal appealing to the deepest and most significant strata of human personality. (Meher Baba, Discourses, p. 164) Meher Baba goes on to say this about psychology, Modern psychology has done much to reveal the sources of conflict, but it has yet to discover methods of awakening inspiration or supplying the mind with something that makes life worth living. (Meher Baba, Discourses, pp. 164-165) He sees raising hidden conflicts to consciousness as the first necessary step. After this, the task of making the right choices is one for the ego to address. But he stresses the essential need for a strong desire and longing of the heart for meaning and for an ideal in order to accomplish these choices.

I have often found that an individual’s despair at not having found meaning becomes a spur that brings him or her into analysis, and often is a quite unformed, barely conscious, gnawing hunger. The ability and drive to follow an ideal comes when analysis is quite far advanced and some of the hang-ups have been resolved. But here Meher Baba is way ahead and not only looking at what is apparent, but also at the desires that lurk within what is unrecognised and unconscious. Perhaps to recognise them would be too threatening to the ego.

Another point that interests me greatly is the way Meher Baba stresses the vital role of the ego, as well as emphasising the need for partial balance being achieved between the head and the heart before much progress can be made. He puts this gradual balancing as a vital process on the spiritual Path.

When Meher Baba comes to the psychological process, he concentrates on the inferiority and superiority complexes rather more than has been usual in recent years, but what he says is particularly illuminating. His approach is from the standpoint of relating to other people either as inferior to oneself or as superior. Projecting inferior feelings onto another enables one to feel superior, and similarly, projecting superior feelings allows one to be angry with the other person, seeing them as aggressive or as bidding for power. At first sight this view seems superficial, leaving out much of the subconscious wishes and conflicts of the inner world, as well as the deeply unconscious warring that takes place between archetypal opposites in the collective unconscious.

The result of bringing these conflicts to consciousness, Meher Baba says, is the awareness of oneness with other people, neither as inferior nor as superior. But look again, for he then takes a quantum leap: The ego wants to feel separate and unique, and it seeks self-expression either in the role of someone who is decidedly better than others or in the role of someone who is decidedly inferior. As long as there is ego, there is an implicit background of duality; and as long as there is the background of duality, the mental operations of comparison and contrast cannot be effectively stilled for long. Therefore, even when a person seems to feel a sense of equality with another, this feeling is not securely established. It marks a point of transition between the two attitudes of the ego rather than permanent freedom from the distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’. (Meher Baba, Discourses, p. 172-173)

Meher Baba then continues, "This pseudo sense of equality, where it exists, may be stated in the formula, ‘I am not in any way inferior or superior to the