An Analysis of Why Meher Baba's Followers Don't Understand Him

The Western metaphysical paradigm is called reductive materialism. We grow up educated in this paradigm. Let me explain it. 

We are taught that things are fundamentally made of smaller things -- all the way down as they say. Things you see with your eyes and feel with your hands are made of molecules. Molecules are groups of two or more atoms held together by chemical bonds. These in turn are made of atoms. Atoms are made of sub-atomic particles, etc. All of these are things. So things are explained by more things.

So when a Westerner picks up a book like God Speaks, every noun is assumed to name a thing and is pictured as a thing.

Therefore, when Baba mentions "souls" we equate these with astral bodies (ghosts). When he mentions planes we equate these with places. When he mentions sanskaras we equate these with chromosomes. When he mentions "God" we equate this with our idea of Yahweh, a late Bronze Age deity adopted by certain henotheist tribes in the Levant as their national god. When he mentions evolution of consciousness we picture Charles Darwin's natural selection.

With such misunderstanding of what Baba is talking about you could read his book God Speaks ten times and still not know what he taught. I could not have understood Berkeley without my thesis advisor explaining the language, nor Kant without my Kant professor explaining what he meant by intuitions. Reading isn't always enough.

For this reason, I feel that one day the Baba community needs teachers and courses. I'm not the administrative type, so could never help with that. 

Gods, ghosts, places, and chromosomes are things. Animal species are things. Baba is not talking about things in God Speaks. He is trying to introduce the reader to a concept of psychic emergence. 

See my paper The Vocabulary and Meaning of the Psychic Emergent Universe.