#jaibaba

I kept looking at His photos and read Wikipedia but couldn't find a scandal or bad rep to His Name. This intrigued me more. So I began to dig through Adrienne’s bookshelf and came upon Discourses Volume II.  

As I began to read, I felt an unshakeable pull and the experience of an energetic "download" occurring instantly. I KNEW His words were the Truth and I couldn't find anything I disagreed with on any page I scrolled through. It was a book that was crafted by a genius of the Spirit and I knew there was something for me to learn.

All this while, an indian Master named Neem Karoli Baba had been in my life for several years. I had had a spiritual awakening listening to Ram Dass in my early 20’s and felt my Heart awaken meditating on pictures of Neem Karoli Baba. Many a great feverish moment of utmost pain and suffering had I dropped down to my face on the floor in prostration begging for mercy and help.

As the days and weeks went on, I read more and more of the Discourses and plunged into the material. I thought, “Well if this Meher Baba said these things He must have some truth to Him. I still don’t know what my relationship to Him is though.” I was not however, consciously seeking Meher Baba as a guide or Master. I was simply interested in the Discourses and appreciated the spiritual topics discussed. One day my girlfriend (Adrienne) got invited to play music at a Baba event in upper New York called the Northeast Gathering and invited me to come. I hesitantly agreed. I wasn’t sure about being around a bunch of “Baba lovers” when I only was just beginning to read His material.

After a long drive with a wonderful man named Pauli from landing in New York, we arrived in a community center near Yonkers surrounded by lush green hills and trees. People greeted us warmly but I felt a little distant until one man named Charles Haynes approached me with the warmest of smiles. I was in line in the dining hall picking out slices of bread from a table covered in condiments.


“Hello there, I was told that you are Adrienne’s partner. Wonderful to meet you, my name is Charles, Charles Haynes”. I shook his outstretched hand. It was cool to the touch, and I felt a soothing energy and smiled back.

“Nice to meet you. My name’s Alan. This is my first time at a Baba meeting.”

His sharp blue eyes eased my tension. He seemed unexplainably familiar.

“Oh that’s wonderful. Well we’re glad you both made it! Would you like to sit together for lunch?” His attire looked sharp, as if he was going to a business meeting.

“Sure, I think Adrienne is already seated over there.”

We walked over to the long table covered in red and white checkered tablecloth. I wanted to sit there because it was in the right side of the room and closer to the tall windows outlooking the green trees and fields beyond. Charles had met Adrienne before so they caught up. I was dipping my bacon in a sunny-side-up egg when suddenly a question popped up in my head. When there was finally a pause in their conversation I said, “ Hey Charles, may I ask you a question about your opinion on God?”

His quiet smile made a sudden shift in the energy at the table, and the chatter from the others at the table lulled to a halt.

“Why, yes of course Alan. Ask away.”

I swallowed my bite of bacon and said, “ So I have a sense that God is beyond comprehension, being everything, everywhere all at once. It seems hard for me to accept or understand how God could be one person, or embodied in a human, since God to me is literally every atom and molecule from earth to the farthest reaches of space. I don’t know if I can see God in one person, since many people have claimed themselves as God in human form before.”

Charles seemed to watch each word I said like he was reading a puzzle, nodding and pausing for a few seconds before he responded.

“Hmm. I think I understand the question implied. Yes, I very much agree that God is everything and everywhere.” His southern twang accented his words, “And it seems to me that in the case of Meher Baba, He is one of the faces of God in human form. But it’s a personal relationship, one that is between you and Him. Some people have such a connection while some do not. Meher Baba loves all indiscriminately.”

His words simmered in my head as the day went on. There was something about the love in Charles’s eyes when he spoke of Baba, something about his deep connection with a man I had never met that was deeply palpable. I pondered on this until the evening when Charles was a guest speaker in the main Hall. There were about 50 people gathered for the talk in the low ceiling-room, most in their mid-50s to 70s. Adrienne and I sat in the front row and I didn’t expect to hear much except a few stories of how Charles met Meher Baba in the 1950’s. What happened next not only changed the entire course of my life, but opened the door of my heart to a pool of unconditional love that continues to sustain me on a daily basis.

Charles got to a place in the story where Baba was visiting His Center in Myrtle Beach South Carolina in 1958. At 8 years old Charles lived on the Center and in this particular moment, Baba was walking past him and did not acknowledge Charles in a way that stirred him up greatly. (Please see this link to Charles telling the story, my explanation here does not give it justice!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_LH4q0FyI8 at the 30:00 min mark on)

Suddenly in a flash of instinct Charles reached out, and took hold of Baba’s sadra (clothing). He mentioned that it was totally out of his character to act in such a manner but found his heart had impelled him to reach out and hold on to Baba. He felt so much love for Baba, not because of any particular reason, but because it was spontaneous and erupted from his very soul. At this point in the story I was sitting very still and listening very intently. The whole room was dead silent and the rhythm of Charles’s voice brought up within me first a warmth in my chest, then what felt like fire and an eruption of emotion that leapt out of my soul. I began to weep so fiercely that it took me by complete surprise. And not only that, but Adrienne had also burst into tears right at the very same moment. It was a force of love I had longed for my whole life, a feeling of complete acceptance and forgiveness, like being cradled in the Cosmic arms of Infinity.

Charles Haynes in Myrtle Beach 1958. The exact moment he leapt for Baba.  

I would experience in the coming weeks and months a powerful remembering; a deep-seated feeling of coming back home to myself through the love for Meher Baba in a series of dreams, visions, meditations, and synchronicities. This familiarity with a man I had not met in this lifetime was perplexing, but brought absolute significance to my life.  As Baba states in Discourses Volume II, page 94:

“The relation between the Master and the disciple is often carried on from one life to another for several reincarnations. Those who have been connected to the Master in past lives are drawn to him by an unconscious magnetism, not knowing why they are thus drawn. There is usually a long history to the apparently unaccountable devotion which the disciple feels for his Master. The disciple is often beginning where he had left off in the last incarnation.”

One night a little while after our trip to NY, I had a dream I was walking through a vast desert with sand as far as the eye could see. I saw a black scorpion and some brush. Suddenly I began to be pulled backward, up and into the top of a closet shelf then into a dimly lit room sitting in a chair. The sun was out but the cream colored blinds were closed. The interior looked retro, from the 1960’s.

A man was sitting in a chair opposite to me near the window looking toward a bed to my right. He was describing what seemed to be his worries and troubles. Suddenly in the middle of his sentence as he was saying the word “sadness” another voice, a voice more clear than I’ve ever heard, thunderously said "SADNESS". A finger pointed at the man and when I followed the tip of the finger to the face, lo and behold it was Meher Baba. As he sat on the bed he looked down at me directly making eye contact. He did not blink as he looked deeply into me, and my whole body began to quiver. It came as a shock because there I was, suspended in the crackling intensity of Truth, breathless, soundless, just vividly awake. I was looking into the eyes of the timeless, eternal One and he looked as real as anyone in “waking” reality.  I’m not sure how long I looked into His eyes, but at one point I began to weep into my hands profusely. I kept repeating over and over "I thought Neem Karoli Baba was my Master". I woke from the dream in fervent tears breathing heavily with my heart racing.

During these early months of Baba slowly but surely hooking me to His Damaan, I was battling my confusion with why Neem Karoli Baba had been in my life and who he was to me now. It wasn’t till one night while staring at Neem Karoli Baba’s photo that the answer came. I had the experience of him telling me, “I have brought you to the Ocean of Love”. I began weeping not knowing what that meant for I hadn’t known that phrase to be connected to Meher Baba. I just felt an indescribable sensation that the “train tracks” were being shifted from one frequency to another.

With tears still streaming down my face I walked into the living room where Adrienne was on her computer. I went over and saw on the screen a quote from Meher Baba that read in big letters, “I AM THE OCEAN OF LOVE”. And that was it. I fell to my knees and it felt like galaxies and starlight imploded in my chest. Baba felt so physically near and I held my heart sobbing hot tears to the ground, for He was the One I knew to be my true Master.

I eventually found a passage in Discourses Volume II Pgs. 54-55, that discussed the experience of having multiple Masters in one lifetime:

“All Perfect Masters are one in their consciousness and it is absurd to imagine any grades between them. Though one Master is not greater than the other, the disciple must, for his own purposes, place the claim of his own Master over and above the claims of other Masters until he transcends the domain of duality and realizes the unity of all life…in very rare cases, owing to special circumstances, the Masters themselves might decide to share the spiritual work in relation to a particular disciple. There are, therefore, exceptional cases of disciples who have had to affiliate to two or more Masters. This is an exception rather than the rule, and where there are more Masters than one, they arrange the distribution of their work so carefully that they do not set up any conflict of claims.”