I grew up in the United States Baba world, i.e. the small group of a couple thousand Americans who still identify as followers of Meher Baba. There’s a saying I heard all my life from the older baby boom followers. It was, ‘They’re going to make it a religion.’ These followers would say this despondently and then sigh as if facing some sad inevitability. Is that really inevitable? I want to explore this idea that the Baba world will soon become a religion. The first question one needs to ask is 'Who are the they they have in mind that are going to do this?' Their words give the impression they envision some kind of outsider. It invokes a sense of other, some intruder? This kind of xenophobia about outsiders is common to cults. What is this sense of other that they are calling future religion? What are the traits they feel a religion has that they don't have? In what sense are they not a religion? Well, it is likely they are speaking of religion as a religious organizatio...
Baba lovers don't believe me when I tell them that Baba gave a teaching that no religion ever gave. They are sure it was said before by Buddha and is in the Buddhist canons or that Adi Shankara (the 8th century founder of Hindu Advaita Vedanta) said it. But they are wrong. In 1956 (a year after God Speaks was published in English) Baba asked a disciple Thirumala Rao to translate God Speaks into Telugu – a major South Indian language. Two years later, Rao returned to Meherabad, laid his completed translation at Baba’s feet, and gave a short speech. In his speech Rao reported: This book cannot be coordinated with any accepted tenets of philosophy in all its aspects. ( Lord Meher , Online Version, p. 4329) Yet Baba’s lovers refuse to believe this, so conditioned are they to think the Dharmic religions already knew what Baba came to teach. Baba had a unique system of sanskaras. While the concept of a sanskara has roots in Buddhism, no Buddhist or Hindu had ever developed Baba’s syste...