VI.
The Inverted Rainbow:
On the Color of Love
Figure 10: Vienna Genesis, rainbow covenant.344
The mystery of the universe is hierarchic in structure. There are graded orders, one supervening upon the other.
– Meher Baba, ‘Supervening Orders in the Spiritual Panorama’, Beams
When one is meant for spiritual advancement, one has either love or lust to the extreme. This lust must be converted into love.
– Meher Baba, The Perfect Master
Being is dying by loving.
– Meher Baba, Discourses
I am man and woman and child. I am sexless […] Have no fear.
– Meher Baba, to Norina Matchabelli
As Meher Baba explains, the impressions which form the ground of all thought, feeling, and action345 are of seven colors in correspondence with the colors of the rainbow:
All thoughts, words and acts cause sanskaras or impressions on one’s mind.
Sanskaras are of seven different colors, the same as those of a rainbow.
Ordinary good thoughts cause impressions of a light blue color.
When such thoughts are put into actions, either in words or deeds, the impressions generally caused are of a deep blue color.
Anger and wicked deeds like murder cause sanskaras of red color. Red sanskaras are the worst, and they are difficult to be wiped out.
Intense spiritual longing gives rise to sanskaras of the green color. Just as red sanskaras are the worst, so the green ones are the best.346
The spiritual significance of the rainbow is thus essentially hierarchical. It concerns the inherent ordering of gross, subtle, and mental forms of being, along with their relative values, along a vertical scale of degrees from best to worst, highest to lowest. Hierarchical degree is the principle according to which the one Reality is expressed in the domain of duality. It is the step or unit of discrimination whereby the realm of opposites serves as the playground for the soul to ascend to the divinely individualized all-sided spiritual perfection that is beyond opposition and intellectual comprehension.347
The hierarchical spectrum of impressions is what makes some kinds of thoughts, feelings, and actions bad, that is, harmful rather than helpful to the life of the unrealized soul. What makes lust, greed, and anger – ‘the chief forms in which the frustrated ego finds expression’348 – lower than purity, generosity, and kindness, respectively, is that the impressions of the former are more binding to consciousness than the latter. Accordingly, the essential problem with sexual promiscuity is not that it is immoral, but that it unnecessarily burdens the mental bodies of its agents349 with an exchange of the most limiting and spiritually or psychically harmful kind of impressions:
There are seven kinds and colors of sanskaras. Red is the worst and the deepest; it is the most lasting impression and takes the longest to be wiped out. These red sanskaras are caused by the sex act, hence they are a great check on the progress and advancement. The sex act is considered a grave sin on the Path and prohibited to spiritual aspirants.
Thoughts [of sexual desire] may come, and even a rush of impulses, but one should not commit any action with another person. Even self-pollution [masturbation] is better, though it is bad in a physical way.
Sexual intercourse has the worst consequences. It attracts to oneself the worst sanskaras of ages past of one’s partner; hence it is most difficult to wipe out. It incurs incredible damage to one’s spiritual progress.350
By contrast, the sanskaric nature of sex in marriage is qualitatively and quantitatively lighter.351 The depth vs. lightness of impressional coloring corresponds to the heaviness vs. lightness of feeling that governs the distinction between lust and love, minimum and maximum:
Love is also different from lust. In lust there is reliance upon the object of sense and consequent spiritual subordination of the soul to it, but love puts the soul into direct and co-ordinate relation with the reality which is behind the form. Therefore lust is experienced as being heavy and love is experienced as being light. In lust there is a narrowing down of life and in love there is an expansion in being. To have loved one soul is like adding its life to your own. Your life is, as it were, multiplied and you virtually live in two centres. If you love the whole world you vicariously live in the whole world, but in lust there is an ebbing down of life and a general sense of hopeless dependence upon a form which is regarded as another. Thus, in lust there is the accentuation of separateness and suffering, but in love there is the feeling of unity and joy. Lust is dissipation, love is recreation. Lust is a craving of the senses, love is the expression of the spirit. Lust seeks fulfillment but love experiences fulfillment. In lust there is excitement, but in love there is tranquility.352
The experiential import of the chromatic nature of impressions is clarified by recognizing that the deepening of impressions correlates directly with the superficialization of experience and the lightening of impressions correlates directly with the deepening of experience. Thus,
If the mind tries to understand sex through increasing the scope of sex, there is no end to the delusions to which it is a prey, for there is no end to the enlarging of its scope. In promiscuity the suggestions of lust are necessarily the first to present themselves to the mind, and the individual is doomed to react to people within the limitation of this initial perversion and thus close the door to deeper experiences.353
Promiscuity is in these terms paradigmatic of the more general scopic delusion governing self-hypnotized consciousness,354 its futile propensity to paradoxically seek satisfaction of and refuge from self-imprisoning desires through indiscriminate multiplication and mixing (pro-miscere) of their objects. Like a prisoner attempting to escape his situation by looking out the window and assembling in his vision more and more objects that only accentuate the fact of his imprisonment, promiscuity is the path of staying on the surface as if doing so would somehow add up to a depth:
Truth cannot be grasped by skipping over the surface of life and multiplying superficial contacts. It requires the preparedness of mind which can centre its capacities upon selected experiences and free itself from its limiting features. This process of discrimination between the higher and the lower, and the transcendence of the lower in favour of the higher, is made possible through whole-hearted concentration and a real and earnest interest in life. Such whole-hearted concentration and real interest is necessarily precluded when the mind becomes a slave to the habit of running at a tangent and wandering between many possible objects of similar experience.355
With respect to the hierarchical spectrum of impressions, promiscuity represents a doomed drive to overcome the multi-colored stains of the mental body by means of an intensive disordering and indistinction that only render the colors more impenetrable and less lucid, quantitatively more thick and qualitatively more flat. Proceeding perforce through the refusal to distinguish the higher from the lower, if not willfully mix them up, promiscuity is the frustrated process of obfuscating the spiritual goal, which is to arrive at the precise balancing of good and bad, higher and lower, which alone liberates the mind from the limitation of coloring all together.356 Meher Baba’s spiritual work and teachings on the problem of sex emphasized the perils of promiscuity and excessive lust. In 1937, in Cannes, he spoke of ‘the work I wish to do for the world involving the minimizing of lust, especially of homosexuals, which is now prevalent to an alarming extent all over the world,’ clarifying later that that this work concerned ‘the youth of the future’.357 The nexus of lust and promiscuity358 is evident more generally in terms of the ordering of satisfaction.359 The promiscuous tendency of lust is on the level of desire for satisfaction, which seeks to consume rather than give to its object, and thus must move like a glutton between several different similar dishes or ‘many possible objects of similar experience’:
In real love there is no desire for satisfaction – only for satisfying! Nowadays, even lust is taken for love. The subtle difference is missed. There is a very subtle difference between love and lust, but it is quite clear. They are two different things. You love rice and curry; this is lust. You love a cigar; lust again. You love curry and eat it, but do not give anything by the act. You finish the beloved!360
The ingestion model of promiscuous lust is also fulfilled in the nature of backbiting, a worst form of speech-lust that accrues the deepest kind of impressions:
If anyone speaks about another’s shortcomings behind his back, even though what he says may be true, it is slander. What effect do the sanskaras of backbiting produce? Suppose Mr. A says to Mr. B: ‘Mr. C has not come; he is a bad man’. Mr. C is not present. Mr. A has told this directly to Mr. B. Consequently, there is an exchange of sanskaras in an indirect way between Mr. A and Mr. C, and in a direct way between Mr. A and Mr. B. Thus, the sanskaras of slandering are of two types – direct and indirect. Thereby, the most minute sanskaras are created and for millions of births it is difficult to be freed from them. Sanskaras are of seven colors. Sanskaras of lust and anger have different colors, and the sanskaras created by backbiting are still deeper. We do not know them as such, but they are some of the worst type and nearly impossible to eradicate. Viruses are very subtle germs and invisible, but they are the most troublesome. Similarly, the sanskaras of calumny and defamation are most wicked and troublesome.361
The sanskaric toxicity of backbiting is the basis for its traditional designation as eating the (dead) flesh of one’s brother.362
Right understanding of the rainbow, then, is that which grasps the priority of its vertical, hierarchical sense over its horizontal structure, just as one does not raise a flag to fly in the wind without first fixing its pole. The rainbow properly represents the panoply of forms only because it is first an order of degrees. It expresses the unitive diversity of the many only because it is first a manifestation of the one that stands beyond all. In other words, the rainbow is formally defined by a balancing of the one and the many without parity, a harmony that neither reduces the one to the many nor equalizes the elements of the many, which are only united in common derivation from the one and ranked difference from each other. Such proper balancing of the vertical and horizontal aspects of the rainbow was in fact dramatized in the semi-collective design process of Meher Baba’s flag in 1924:
It had been proposed that a flag be flown near the Jhopdi and a debate ensued about it. The Hindus said the color of the flag should be red, but Ramjoo objected, saying that red reflected only Vedant, and that green was better. Then the Hindus took objection, arguing that green was typically a Mohammedan color. The Parsis and Iranis disapproved of both colors, and to bring about accord, Baba proposed, ‘The flag should be of seven colors’. Dina prepared a flag accordingly and, after it was sewn, it was hoisted near the Master’s Jhopdi on the evening of 23 April 1924.
As the flag stirred, Baba remarked, ‘Do you know why I suggested a seven-colored flag? The seven colors represent the seven planes of consciousness’.
Baba had specified the positioning of two colors: ‘Red should be at the bottom of the flag and sky blue at the top. Arrangement of the other five colors is your decision’.
He later added: ‘Besides representing the seven planes of consciousness, these colors also represent sanskaras. The colors in the flag signify man’s rise from the grossest of impressions of lust and anger – symbolized by red – to the culmination in the highest state of spirituality and oneness with God – symbolized by sky blue’.363
Solving the contention around different religious identities without reducing itself to the purpose of solving them, the choice of the rainbow is suggested by Baba for higher and deeper reasons which yet give free play to the drama of individual human choice. In this way, the process of designing the flag spontaneously reflected the nature of the rainbow itself as firstly a vertical and secondly a horizontal form. Likewise, the decision process performs the reordering of different religious paths around a unitive spiritual truth that stands beyond religion itself. The significance of the flag remains independent of the context of its production, indifferent to all dramas of symbolic identification. The flag does not name or represent the identity of whoever flies it, much less the values of a party, but stands as a direct reflection of the spiritual ladder that one is – willy-nilly – on. It is not a flag of, but a flag for the one who sees it.
In accord with the independent status of Meher Baba’s flag – or better, the flag that Meher Baba and his followers made – among the first things one will notice is its vertical difference (with the exception of the Italian PACE [peace] flag) from both the natural rainbow and its common use in other flags and elsewhere. Compared to the common rainbow, this flag is upside down, with the consequence, clearly intended by the choice of ‘sky blue’ for the top color, that the highest part of the flag chromatically bleeds into the sky itself in harmony with the upward gaze of the viewer, a gaze that as such figurally participates in the principle of spiritual ascent represented by the flag. The design also evokes the circumzenithal arc or ‘smile in the sky’ whose colors are purer than those of those of the rainbow.364 The more popular kind of rainbow flag does the opposite, keeping red at the top of the order, or in the case of the original design of the LGBT/Gay Pride flag, even adding an eighth color (hot pink) in the head position to signify sexuality.
That Meher Baba’s flag is properly understood as a righting of the rainbow via inversion is supported by his general view on the common spiritual darkness of the human mind365 and his promise to turn the world upside down: ‘with the breaking of my silence will come the manifestation of my internal work which will turn the world upside down’.366 ‘A time will come when I will have to turn the world upside down’ (cf. Figure 10).367 The spiritually inverted rainbow addresses itself precisely to the human soul who, having fully developed his consciousness via the kingdoms of cosmic evolution, now finds himself, in an excessively human or non-natural world,368 ironically inverted vis-à-vis the spiritual planes through which he must ascend via involution:
Having achieved full consciousness as man, he has already arrived at his destination, for he now possesses the capacity to become fully conscious of his Soul. Still he is unable to realize this divine destiny because his consciousness remains completely focused in his inverted, limited, finite self – the Mind – which, ironically has been the means of achieving consciousness.369
Furthermore, the inverted rainbow of spiritual reality, the chromatic image of the hierarchical order of the human spirit, embodies a universal, vertical, and ideal alternative to other symbolic uses of the rainbow in the modern world. More specifically, the spiritually righted rainbow stands in contrast to the inordinate exaltation of sexual experience and identity in modern culture.
Here the position of lust in the spectrum of impressions becomes crucial, as it constitutes both a foundation and the lowest degree of the vertical order, in keeping with the fact of sexual pleasure as the highest sign of the inherent emptiness of worldly pleasure:
Sexual intercourse is the highest type of sensual pleasure in the world. But how long does it last? Only a few minutes.
If this, the highest of all worldly pleasures, is compared with the real happiness of eternal divine bliss, it is a mere shadow of a drop from the infinite ocean of eternal bliss. When once realised, this bliss is felt and enjoyed every second forever.
From this comparison you can imagine the hollowness of the world and its pleasures.370
Symbolically, lust is the hinge upon which the rainbow is rightly inverted, just as lust is at once the force behind the creation of the universe and the foremost obstacle on the spiritual path:
Lust means a craze. Some have the lust for power, some lust of the senses, etc.
The whole creation came out of lust. The first whim was lustful. God had intercourse with himself through the Om point, and the creation was the result of this act.371
In the spiritual path, lust is the greatest obstacle.372
As the ‘hinge’ obstacle, lust is also the tensional line that persists until the end and bisects all other barriers on the path.373 Lust is thus crucial in the sense of a ladder to push against, a providential enemy and scalar force one must heroically fight in order to realize its own utility and good:
Lust is not bad. Because of this lust, you have been born as human beings. It is due to this very lust that you will turn from men into God. But even if lust is there in you, don’t put it into action. From the spiritual point of view, lust is the worst possible weakness. The real hero is he who successfully fights it.
... The fact is, you should have this lust, but you should do your utmost not to fall prey to it. You should put up a fierce fight, and though defeated a thousand times, you should again be ready to continue to fight the lust.
Were I to wish it, I could destroy the lust in you in no time. But what would be the use of destroying it? Inevitably I will destroy it. In the meantime, continue on with the battle inside yourselves. This is the law. It is necessary. Then joy will come in defeating lust.
Without a struggle, there is no pleasure in fighting. The real pleasure lies in success after so many defeats. Wars won without obstacles, without sacrifices and untiring effort afford no pleasure. This should be a life and death fight. Lust is there to be fought. It is a lifelong struggle. It will be a conflict in you till the end of your days. It should be there to fight you, and you should always be alert and ready for battle, to kill....
Foremost you should try to get rid of lust, as all other vices are on account of it. For instance, if a parrot’s throat is cut, it dies. But if its wings are clipped, it does not die; after some time the feathers of the wings grow back. Lust can be compared to the parrot’s head. Therefore when lust is still present and we conquer other evils, such as anger, the evils again revive – everything rises out of the head. But if lust is killed once and for all, every other evil is also destroyed. You have to cut off its head.
Yet in truth, lust is necessary for evolution. It starts developing in the vegetable forms. With the increase in lust, there is advancement in evolution, since lust means energy. And with the increase in energy, consciousness expands.
But these are points on this path which you will never understand. There are thousands of points thinner than hair. Remember, it is no easy thing to eradicate sanskaras gathered during birth after birth, and lust is the hardest of all sanskaras. But be heroes and fight lust; you will defeat it. The real pleasure is to fight it and not succumb to it. Knowing this, I let it remain, but I will destroy it in you when the right time comes. Until then, go on fighting, and never give up.374
The necessity of fighting lust as an originary force is predicated upon its being the lowest form of love, the minimum whose inherent limitation negatively but indirectly affirms with the utmost persistence the maximum of its own higher reality:
Lust is the most limited form of love functioning under the thraldom of ignorance. The unambiguous stamp of insufficiency which lust invariably bears is in itself a sign that it is an incomplete and inadequate expression of something deeper, which is vast and unlimited. Through the manifold and unending sufferings which are attendant upon undiluted lust, and the continued experiences of frustration which it brings, the spirit is ceaselessly registering its unyielding protest against the utter superficiality of a life of unqualified lust. In this manner the irrepressible voice of the infinity of God’s love indirectly asserts the imperative claims of its unexpressed but unimpaired reality.375
The rainbow of impressions thus also corresponds to the different forms of love – lust, longing, resignation – which predominate in the gross, subtle, and mental spheres, respectively, as intimated by the impressional greenness of spiritual longing (see above), which like spring is the principle of upward and self-renewing turning from lower to higher forms of love. The inverted rainbow is the chromatic scale of love which maps the journey of the soul as a ‘thrilling divine romance’.376
Fittingly, green was the favorite color of Baba’s closest female disciple, Mehera Irani.377 And Mehera’s favorite color for Meher Baba was pink or rose, the non-spectral color that one perceives ‘between’ the high and low ends of the spectrum and the alterative of green (white light minus green equals pink).378 If black is the color of the absence of light (the color of vision itself), rose is the color of the presence of light without color. Meher Baba called Mehera his ‘Radha’, spoke of her many times as ‘the purest soul in the universe,’ and said, ‘She is my very breath without which I cannot live’.379
From this elevated perspective, to restrict the sense of pink to the lowest expressions of love makes even less sense than calling black white.
O friend, I am dying! Surely I die.
The anguish of being kept apart
From Krishna is more than I can bear.
Alas! to whom then shall I leave
My priceless Treasure? When I am dead,
I beg you, do not burn my body;
Do not cast it into the river.
See that it is not given to the flames;
Do not cast it into the water.
In this body I played with Krishna.
Bind my lifeless form, I beg you,
To the black tamala’s branches;
Tie it to the tamala tree.
Touching tamala it touches black.
Krishna is black, and black is tamala;
Black is the colour that I love.
From earliest childhood I have loved it.
To the black Krishna my body belongs;
Let it not lie apart from black!380
344 Public domain image, source: <https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/ferguson_photos/2305/>.
345 ‘From the psychogenetic point of view, human actions are based upon the operation of the impressions stored in the mind through previous experience. Every thought, emotion and act is grounded in groups of impressions which, when considered objectively, are seen to be modifications of the mind-stuff of man. These impressions are deposits of previous experience and become the most important factors in determining the course of present and future experience. The mind is constantly creating and gathering such impressions in the course of its experience. When occupied with the physical objects of this world such as the body, nature and other things, the mind is, so to say, externalised, and creates gross impressions. When it is busy with its own subjective mental processes (which are the expressions of already existing sanskaras), it creates subtle and mental impressions. The question whether sanskaras come first or experience comes first is like the question whether the hen or the egg comes first. Both are conditions of each other and develop side by side. The problem of understanding the significance of human experience, therefore, turns round the problem of understanding the formation and function of sanskaras’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 54–5).
346 Meher Message, 2:7 (July 1930), p.8.
347 ‘In order to have a comprehensive idea of what is implied in perfection, it is necessary to classify it into two categories. There is spiritual perfection, which consists in the inner realisation of a transcendent state of consciousness beyond duality. There is also perfection as expressed and seen in the domain of duality. All related existence which is a part of the manifold world of manifestation admits of degrees; and when we are concerned with perfection as seen in this manifested world, we find that, like other things subject to duality, it also admits of degrees. Bad and good, weakness and strength, vice and virtue are all opposites within duality. In fact, all these aspects are expressions of the one Reality in different degrees. Thus, evil is not utterly evil but goodness in its lowest degree; weakness is not mere incapacity but strength in its lowest degree; and vice is not pure vice but virtue at its lowest. In other words, evil is the minimum of good; weakness is the minimum of strength; and vice is the minimum of virtue. All the aspects of duality have a minimum and a maximum and all intervening degrees; perfection is no exception to this […] When perfection is concerned with duality it consists in the excellence of some attribute or capacity. In this context perfection in one respect does not necessarily include perfection in other respects […] The different types of excellence which are characteristic of duality are all within the scope of the intellect, for such excellence can be easily envisaged by the extension (in imagination) of something good which is found in the limited experience of everyday life. The perfection which belongs to the spiritually realized souls is not in the domain of duality, and as such is entirely beyond the scope of the intellect. It has no parallel in the domain of duality […] All sorts of excellence are latent in spiritual perfection. Krishna was spiritually perfect. He was also perfect in everything. If he had wanted to he could have shown himself as a perfect drunkard, a perfect sinner, a perfect rogue or a perfect murderer, but that would have shocked the world. Though possessed of perfection in every respect, it was not necessary for him to exhibit it in fulfilling his mission. The spiritually perfect souls can exhibit supreme excellence in any mode of life which they may be required to adopt for the spiritual upliftment of other souls, but they do not do so merely to show themselves as perfect in that respect. Excellence of capacities is used by them only when there is a spiritual need for it, not merely to satisfy the curiosity of others. When they use such excellence of capacity they do so with utter detachment […] If you try to grasp the nature of perfection by means of a set standard (implying an opposite), you are bound to limit it and thus fail to understand its real significance. Perfection includes the opposites and transcends them, therefore the perfect man is not bound by any rule or limited ideal. He is beyond good and bad, but his law for those who are good gives good reward, and for those who are bad it responds in their own coin. Krishna proved to Arjuna, who was his devotee, that his apparent bringing about of the physical and mental annihilation of the vicious Kauravas was for their spiritual salvation. Perfection might manifest itself through killing or saving according to the spiritual demands of the situation. The heart of the Perfect One is at once soft like butter and hard like steel’ (Meher Baba, Discourses I, 115–9).
348 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 27.
349 As Meher Baba once explained, the mental body has the form of a chromatic circle of seven colors: ‘If you see Chanji with your gross eyes, you see his figure – no circle, no colors surrounding him. But if you concentrate and can see him through your subtle eyes, you can see his astral form without color or mark – a faint form, a bit blue or grayish. If, however, you have developed mental consciousness and see him through your mental eye, you see him in the form of a circle with seven colors – all blended together in one. This can only be seen by a Master. Colors are due to sanskaras created by imagination. Why seven colors? When the first clash between Energy and the Heavens [or Space; Pran and Akash] took place, it created a spark, a circle which had seven colors. All such sparks have seven colors. None knows that even before the electron, there is one form in the beginning. But what name to give it! The clash of Energy and the Heavens created this first form’ (Lord Meher, p. 1731).
350 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, pp. 1889–90.
351 ‘The aspirant must choose one of the two courses which are open to him. He must take to the life of celibacy or to the married life, and he must avoid at all costs a cheap compromise between the two. Promiscuity in sex gratification is bound to land the aspirant in a most pitiful and dangerous chaos of ungovernable lust. As such diffused and undirected lust veils the higher values, it perpetuates entanglement and creates in the spiritual path insuperable difficulties to the internal and spontaneous renunciation of craving. Sex in marriage is entirely different from sex outside marriage. In marriage the sanskaras of lust are much lighter and are capable of being removed more easily. When sex-companionship is accompanied by a sense of responsibility, love and spiritual idealism, conditions for the sublimation of sex are much more favourable than when it is cheap and promiscuous’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 146).
352 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 159–60.
353 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 146–7.
354 ‘The boundary in which consciousness can move is prescribed by the sanskaras, and the functioning of consciousness is also determined by the desires. As desires aim at self-satisfaction, the whole consciousness becomes self-centred and individualised. The individualisation of consciousness may in a sense be said to be the effect of the vortex of desires. The soul gets enmeshed in the desires and cannot step out of the circumscribed individuality constituted by these desires. It imagines these barriers and becomes self-hypnotised’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 36).
355 Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 147.
356 ‘When there is exact balancing and overlapping of good and bad sanskaras, they both disappear, with the result that what remains is a clean slate of mind on which nothing is written, and which therefore reflects the Truth as it is without perversion. Nothing is ever written on the soul. The sanskaras are deposited on the mind and not on the soul. The soul always remains untarnished, but it is only when the mind is a clean mirror that it can reflect the Truth’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 99). ‘Good actions bind a man with a golden chain, and bad actions with an iron-spiked one. But the chain is there in either case, and the man is never set free. Yoga and other practices are good and merit an aspirant a good life in the next birth, but a man is never free from bondage or given mukti as a result of them. Therefore, to achieve emancipation, one must be without virtues or sins – without any kind of sanskaras. One’s slate should be quite clean without credit or debit in one’s account’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 333). Cf. ‘It is all a question of the mind. Bondage and liberation are of the mind alone. The mind will take the colour you dye it with. It is like white clothes just returned from the laundry. If you dip them in red dye, they will be red. If you dip them in blue or green, they will be blue or green’ (Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, chapter 5, <http://www.belurmath.org/>).
357 ‘One day in Cannes, Baba disclosed, “For my work I need a healthy, handsome, intelligent and innocent boy. These qualities are essential for the work I wish to do for the world involving the minimizing of lust, especially of homosexuals, which is now prevalent to an alarming extent all over the world. If the boy is not innocent, he would at once misunderstand my intention, which would hinder instead of help my work”. On another occasion, when Kitty questioned Baba about his work with the boys, he remarked, “I am working with the youth of the future”’ (Lord Meher, pp. 1863–4). It should be noted here for the unfamiliar reader that Meher Baba never condemned homosexuality and that homosexuals were among his closest followers. The true self is sexless and the spiritual problem is not sexual orientation but lust. Speaking in 1952 of the youth of America, a nation he singled out as ‘destined to lead the world spiritually’, Baba said, ‘be sure these very youths who now know not of God, but know only to eat, drink, be merry and do lustful actions, will soon get the shock of their lives and know that only loving God is real life!’ (Lord Meher, p. 3082). Cf. ‘I like the Americans best, and the Italians for their good hearts; but I don’t like the way the Arabs behave – they are the worst, full of lust!’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 1511).
358 ‘If one is lustful, he has a tendency to fasten his lust upon several persons of the opposite sex’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 2275).
359 ‘I will tell you something about lust and love. It has such a feeble link of demarcation that lust can be thought of as love, and love as lust; and yet, love takes you to God, and lust binds you in illusion. The sign of love is one: love never asks for anything. The lover gives all to the Beloved. Lust wants everything. Remember that one who wants nothing is never disappointed. He who wants nothing has everything’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 3627). ‘Lust wants possessions. Love gives possessions’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 1895).
360 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 1779.
361 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 4667.
362 ‘Saint John Chrysostom paints an eloquent picture of the evils of backbiting. “What is the use of sparing birds and fishes if we eat our own brothers?” he says. Indeed, the backbiter rips his brother’s flesh with his teeth and tears his neighbor’s body to shreds. That is what Saint Paul wants to frighten us from when he says, “If you bite and devour one another, take heed or you will be consumed by one another” (Galatians 5. 15) […] Saint Gregory declares, “There is no doubt that those who indulge in backbiting others, feed on their flesh” (Saint Gregory, Moral, Book 14, Chapter 14). Making himself equal to God, the backbiter pretends to examine hearts and discern the most secret things in man, even his intentions. He would wrest God’s sword from His hand if he could. The backbiter is so fond of human flesh he often spares not even his own relatives’ (Father Belet, ‘Sins of the Tongue: The Backbiting Tongue’, <http://www.catholicapologetics.info/morality/general/btongue.htm>). ‘O you who have believed, avoid much [negative] assumption. Indeed, some assumption is sin. And do not spy or backbite each other. Would one of you like to eat the flesh of his brother when dead? You would detest it. And fear Allah; indeed, Allah is Accepting of repentance and Merciful’ (Koran, 49. 12). ‘Jesus and his disciples went past a dead dog. The disciples said, “It stinks repulsively”. But Jesus said, “Its teeth are so white”. In this way, He taught them never to say anything bad about anyone’ (Hilyatu’l-awliya, II, 283, quoted in Ishak Ersen, Jesus Christ in the Traditions of Islam, < http://www.light-of-life.com/eng/sources/s4395et1.htm>). Feeding on what it spits out, backbiting is psychic consumption of another’s rotten body.
363 Lord Meher, p. 504.
364 <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumzenithal_arc>.
365 ‘The mind of the worldly minded is darkened by a thick layer of accumulated sanskaras which must be considerably weakened for the aspirant even to enter the Path […] What is conventionally recognised need not always be spiritually sound. On the contrary, many conventions express and embody illusory values since they have come into existence as a result of the working of average minds which are spiritually ignorant. Illusory values are mostly conventional because they grow into that matrix of mentality which is most common’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, III, 113).
366 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 723.
367 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 800.
368 ‘The sanskaras are of two types – natural and non-natural – according to the manner in which they come into existence. The sanskaras which the soul gathers during the period of organic evolution are natural sanskaras. These sanskaras come into existence as the soul successively takes up and abandons the various sub-human forms, thus gradually passing from the apparently inanimate state of the stone or metal to the human state, where there is full development of consciousness. All the sanskaras which cluster round the soul before it attains the human form are the product of natural evolution and are referred to as natural sanskaras. They should be carefully distinguished from the sanskaras cultivated by the soul after the attainment of the human form. The sanskaras which get attached to the soul during the human stage are cultivated under the moral freedom of consciousness with its accompanying responsibility of choice between good and bad, virtue and vice. They are referred to as non-natural sanskaras. Though these post-human sanskaras are directly dependent upon the natural sanskaras, they are created under fundamentally different conditions of life, and are, in their origin, comparatively more recent than the natural sanskaras. This difference in length of the formative periods and in the conditions of formation is responsible for the difference in the degree of firmness of attachment of the natural and non-natural sanskaras to the soul. The non-natural sanskaras are not as difficult to eradicate as the natural sanskaras which have an ancient heritage and are therefore more firmly rooted’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, I, 55–6).
369 Meher Baba, Everything and the Nothing, p. 46, my emphasis.
370 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 352.
371 Meher Baba, Awakener 22:1 (1960), p. 40.
372 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 1095.
373 ‘The game atya-patya is played in a large rectangular field with many parallel horizontal lines and one bisecting vertical line. Once, when the game was being vigorously played, Baba stopped play and called the men under the shade of a nearby tree where he explained its spiritual meaning: “The horizontal lines are the barriers representing pride, anger, greed, jealousy, hatred, envy and egoism, which the traveler on the spiritual path has to overcome before attaining the spiritual goal of God-realization. The bisecting line represents lust which persists to the end, even long after the other undesirable qualities have been subdued and overcome. Once the goal is attained, these very faults are elevated to the level of divine attributes, and nothing but good accrues to others when they are expressed. Those on the Path can and do help others, yet only up to the point or level where they themselves are. But those who have realized the ultimate state of God and reached the goal of Self-Realization can help others stranded at any stage of the inner journey”’ (Lord Meher, p. 275).
374 Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, pp. 1099–1101.
375 Meher Baba, Discourses, III, 177.
376 ‘Even in the lowest lustful life of the gross sphere, God is experiencing Himself as a lover, but it is a state of a lover who is completely ignorant about the true nature of himself or the beloved. It is a state of a lover who is inexorably separated from the beloved by an opaque curtain of un-understood duality. It is nevertheless the beginning of a long process by which the lover breaks through the enveloping curtain of ignorance and comes into his own Truth as unbounded and unhampered Love. But in order to get initiated into infinite love, the lover has to go through two other stages which are characteristic of the subtle and mental spheres.
The lover in the subtle sphere is not free from lust, but the lust which he experiences is not undiluted as in the gross sphere. The intensity of lust in the subtle sphere is about half that in the gross sphere. Besides, there is no gross expression of lust as in the gross sphere. The lover in the gross sphere is inextricably entangled with the gross objects; hence his lust finds gross expression. But the lover in the subtle sphere has gotten free from attachment to gross objects; hence in his case lust remains unexpressed in the gross form. His lust has subtle expressions, but it cannot have gross expression. Besides, since about half of the original lust of the gross sphere gets sublimated in the subtle sphere, the lover in the subtle sphere experiences love not as undiluted lust, but in a higher form as longing to be united with the Beloved.
Thus in the gross sphere love expresses itself as lust, and in the subtle sphere it expresses itself as longing. Lust is a craving for sensations and as such is completely selfish in motive. It has utter disregard for the well-being of the beloved. In longing there is less of selfishness, and though it continues to be possessive in a way, the beloved is recognised as having worth and importance in his own right. Longing is a less limited form of love than lust. In longing the curtain of duality has become more transparent and less obstructive, since the lover now consciously seeks to overcome duality between the lover and the Beloved by securing the presence of the Beloved. In lust the emphasis is solely on the limited self and the beloved is completely subsidiary to the gross needs of the self. In longing the emphasis is equally distributed on the self and on the beloved, and the lover realises that he exists for the beloved just in the same way as the beloved exists for him.
The lover in the mental sphere has an even higher and freer expression of love. In his case, though lust has not completely disappeared, it is mostly sublimated. Only about one-fourth of the original lust of the gross sphere remains, but it remains in a latent form without any expression. In the mental sphere, lust does not have even subtle expression. The lover of the mental sphere is detached from subtle objects, and he is free from possessive longing for the beloved which is characteristic of the lover in the subtle sphere.
In the mental sphere love expresses itself as complete resignation to the will of the beloved. All selfish desire, including longing for the presence of the beloved, has disappeared. Now the emphasis is solely on the worth and will of the beloved. Selfishness is utterly wiped out and there is a far more abundant release of love in its pure form. However, even in the mental sphere love has not become infinite, since there is still present the thin curtain of duality which separates the lover from the beloved. Love is no longer in the clutches of selfishness, but it is still short of being infinite because it is experienced through the medium of the finite mind, just as in the lower spheres it is experienced through the medium of the lower bodies.
Love becomes consciously infinite in being as well as in expression, when the individual mind is transcended. Such love is rightly called divine, because it is characteristic of the God-state in which all duality is finally overcome. In divine love, lust has completely disappeared. It does not exist even in latent form. Divine love is unlimited in essence and expression, because it is experienced by the soul through the soul itself. In the gross, subtle and mental spheres the lover is conscious of being separated from the beloved, but when all these spheres are transcended, the lover is conscious of his unity with the Beloved. The lover loses himself in the being of the Beloved and knows that he is one with the Beloved. Divine love is entirely free from the thraldom of desires or limiting self. In this state of infinity the lover has no being apart from the Beloved. He is the Beloved Himself.
We thus have God as infinite love, first limiting Himself in the forms of creation, and then recovering His infinity through the different stages of creation. All the stages of God’s experience of being a finite lover ultimately culminate in His experiencing Himself as the sole Beloved. The sojourn of the soul is a thrilling divine romance in which the lover, who in the beginning is conscious of nothing but emptiness, frustration, superficiality and the gnawing chains of bondage, gradually attains an increasingly fuller and freer expression of love, and ultimately disappears and merges in the divine Beloved to realise the unity of the Lover and the Beloved in the supreme and eternal fact of God as Infinite Love’ (Meher Baba, Discourses, III, pp. 177–80).
377 See <https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/none/path/se80bcf7e1bbfb507/image/i601758fdb3dfa504/version/1279084917/image.jpg>.
378 ‘There is No Pink Light’, <http://youtu.be/S9dqJRyk0YM>.
379 ‘Mehera’s love for me is 100 percent pure. It is not like others who love Baba. All these years she has been with me, and has been as pure as anything. She has no lustful thoughts or desires – not even for her “Krishna” [Baba]. Nothing at all. Her sole purpose in life is to love me’ (Meher Baba, quoted in Lord Meher, p. 5312). See David Fenster, Mehera-Meher: A Divine Romance, 3 vols. (2003).
380 Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, chapter 23, < http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/gospel/volume_1/23_festival_at_surendras.htm>