Statements by Meher Baba about his movie, and interpretation

Meher Baba in Hollywood, 1932

The following are common misunderstandings about the film project Meher Baba began and worked on before abandoning in the 1930s.

Misunderstanding 1: Baba wrote a screenplay for a Hollywood movie on his theme of Reincarnation in the 30s. In reality what people are calling a script or screenplay was only an outline of possible movie scenes worked up by him in an hour while sitting down with screenwriter Mercedes De Acosta at her home in Harmon on the Hudson in New York.

Many other stories and even whole scripts were written as well by others as potential candidates for this movie project. Writers included Hy Kraft, Karl Vollmoeller, and Alexander Markey. None of these scenarios and scripts were ever approved by Baba for production. 

These facts are recorded in the book Early Messages to the West written by the Avatar Meher Baba Trust and published by Sheriar Foundation in 2009.

Misunderstanding 2: The outline by Baba and Acosta was meant by Baba to be taken as a blueprint for a film.

The reality is that Baba was only demonstrating how simple his basic idea was. It described five characters who we follow over several lifetimes as they progress spiritually. Eventually one achieves God-realization and his companions become his disciples. The title and details of the scenario were arbitrary, not to be followed literally. It was the theme he was trying to get across, not the story.

Baba later even said he was actually preparing the ground for a future trend in films, a medium that has evolved significantly since then.

Someday the themes we are discussing now will form the basis of an entirely new trend in motion pictures. (Lord Meher, 1986 print ed. p. 2215)

Misunderstanding 2: The movie Baba was talking about had to be a movie. Sound movies only began in 1929. In 1932, the year Baba began working on the project, the average Hollywood movie was black and white, screened in nearly square format, filmed entirely in a studio, and was about 81 to 90 minutes. By the 1950s movies were color, shot in wide-screen technicolor, and frequently ran over three hours. By the 2000s movies were watched at home on flat screens in home theaters, streamed by platforms like Netflix. Breaking Bad and Firefly were some of the first viral series. The Netflix series became the trend and the idea of binge-watching came to be popular. In the early 2010s broad open-world games like GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption became sensations with players becoming immersed in games for hundreds of hours. 

The future still remains open as story entertainment continues to evolve.

Misunderstanding 3: Baba had in mind for people to make a movie about him, or that included him. There is zero evidence of this in anything Baba ever said about such  movie(s). Baba clearly was emphasizing the power of the medium of motion pictures -- under which we today would include the forms mentioned above and others to come -- to convey ideas to the masses.

I do not need to tell you who are engaged in the production and distribution of motion pictures what a power you hold in your hands, nor do I doubt that you are fully alive to the responsibilities which the wielding of that power involves. He who stimulates the imagination of the masses can move them in any direction he chooses, and there is no more powerful an instrument for stimulating their imagination than motion pictures. . . Both the press and the radio influence thought, but both lack the power of visible example, which is the greatest stimulant to action, and which the motion picture offers better now than any other medium. (Meher Baba's message to Hollywood, delivered at Pickfair in June 1932)

Gabriel Pascal, 1945

Misunderstanding 4: Baba abandoned the project or it "fell through." 

Baba stopped actively working on the film in 1934, but continued to discuss its future production with producer Gabriel Pascal as late as the 1950s (The Disciple and His Devil, Valerie Pascal, 1970).

And Baba once said the film had to be made one day.

Below is a chart Baba had made to explain the theme of Creation in the movie. 

It is my personal opinion that the themes Baba described in the 1930s will eventually be expressed as a video game franchise about reincarnation and karma as well as the ultimate purpose of life.

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.

Philosophy’s modern image of itself as a bulwark against disruptive inquiry

 

What Locke said in the 18th century in England still holds a lot of sway in philosophy today, I think. 

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1609) the English philosopher John Locke wrote of the role of philosophy as serving as the under-laborer to the master-builder that is science. He meant that because science is so great, the only role left for philosophers was to clear the rubbish that kept people from believing in what scientists claim.

What he effectively implied was that philosophy was meant to be a bulwark against innovative philosophical contemplation or critique of the assumptions of science.

The problem with this view is that science has no actual view of reality. The scientists he idealized as “master-builders” could only tease out laws from their observations. They were helpless to see how those laws fit into a larger picture. 

The logical positivists furthered this idea by Locke, and the linguistic philosophers who followed them (led initially by Ludwig Wittgenstein) literally saw the role of philosophy as a kind of therapy for the ‘disorder’ of questioning metaphysical assumptions. See Ernest Gellner's Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic Philosophy (1959).

So my philosopher colleagues were trained to see their role as preventing ideas like EOP (that integrates the achievements of science into a larger vision) from coming to the fore. This will not last, for people will eventually see it.

CIA and Academia

Why RD2 is still the best

Esalen Institute

Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, is often romanticized as a countercultural hub of the human potential movement, but critics and skeptics often "debunk" its mystical claims as expensive, pseudoscientific self-help wrapped in a corporate shell.

Timothy Leary Lying About What Meher Baba Said About Drugs

An excerpt from "Nema Aviona Za Zagreb." For the full film go here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7BhnI81P8w&t=2s

Filmed by Jan de Bont (pictured above). The footage of Meher Baba was shot in Meherazad, India on 20 September 1967. The Timothy Leary footage was shot in the same year at Milbrooke.

Uncaptured Jews in the Islamic Republic of Iran

How ChatGPT depicts me

I asked ChatGPT to create an image of Philosopher Christopher Jonathan Ott, who wrote "The Evolution of Perception" and this is what I got.

Compare to the actual me.

Max Blumenthal – Brilliant Rebuttal

Lies and False Rumors of Lies

There is a belief that is trending among a large minority of people. Demographically I can't describe who they are. But I know there are many who ascribe to it because I read it all the time online, and have heard people refer to it.

It is the line that "Everything they taught you in school was a lie."

There are some lies told to us in school, but they weren't made up by school teachers or even text-book writers. Rather they come down from past centuries and are known by real historians to be untrue. These scholars even regret that teachers have not gotten the memo.

The irony is that these false stories known to be untrue are not the ones these conspiracists are calling lies. They actually believe the ones known to be lies.

I am specifically speaking of:

• The false belief that Atlantis was a real place.
• The false belief that Oswald didn't act alone.
• The false belief that mischief went on at the 1st Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.
• The false belief that Christopher Columbus argued with the scholars of his day that the world was round.
• The false belief that reincarnation was removed from the teachings of Christianity.

So, as I said, the irony is that these false ideas are believed in by the very people who say that everything you learned in school was a lie. One can easily discover the truth about these false assumptions by reading modern scholarship about them. But another irony is that people who believe there is an academic conspiracy to lie to them won't read these books. This is like putting a veil over your own head so you cannot see.

I have never seen any remedy for the circular form of thinking these people have. I once told two engineers, so seemingly smart people, that the scholars at the time of Columbus knew the world was round, and they denied it ardently. I told them they could look it up on Wikipedia. Their reply was sarcastic. "Who wrote the Wikipedia article, you?" Ha ha ha. You can't correct these people. As Jeffrey Burton Russell, author of Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians writes, scholars and historians have been unsuccessfully trying to correct this historical misconception since the 1920s. Incidentally, the idea was invented in the early 1800s.

While I have studied epistemology and written many papers on the topic, it seems to me that far beyond lack of knowledge of the methods of scientific reasoning and logical principles, the greater culprit in man's ignorance is his own prejudices.  

Baba Vs. Human Addictions

The message on this white board would apply to Meher Baba as much as Jesus.

I live with the Baba followers. It was my fate. I was born into it. But if I were younger I would move away. They have this trope. They say all the time, "They're going to make it a religion." I wrote a blog post about this phrase. But it is the people who say this that are creating one, one Baba would not recognize.

Virtually all my posts that have to do with Meher Baba's teaching are attempts to address and correct ideas that his followers have made up to replace what he really wrote in his books. I even did a recent post showing how easy it is for us to examine his actual teachings, as opposed to the followers of past religions who essentially have to do forensic research now to discover it.

I have tried to analyze why people feel the need to replace what their master said with their own primitive assumptions from the past -- very often the very ideas that master came to help people see past and overcome. I believe it is that the needs and desires of ordinary people aren't met by these teachings. Instead of a new way of looking at things, they want their cultural addictions affirmed. 

I'll give some examples. Baba's early Western followers were already attached to and convinced by occult books of the 19th and early 20th century, including things like Theosophy. They were always looking to syncretize whatever he said to those teachings, even though he said those teachings were mostly false and silly. Then Baba's hippy followers came in the 60s and 70s. They interpreted every teaching by Baba through New Age and the Human Potential Movement (HPM) worldviews. 

Of course my writing does no good. Quoting Baba where he fully contradicts these past philosophical trends doesn't reach people. It passes in one ear and out the other, even though they can easily look up what Baba said, and I usually give the exact source to make it easy. That's why I call this an 'addiction.' You can hardly help a person get sober simply by telling them the dangers of intoxication and the benefits of sobriety. No matter how rational you are, the addiction is far, far stronger than reason.

The real Baba doesn't scratch the itch they have, the need for experiences, dreams, secret doctrines, and self-importance. They are chasing a feeling they once had in their youth, a feeling Baba does not help them relive. And I can't see anything anyone can do about that. As they say, 'It is what it is.'

So when I see that white board, it saddens me. For the ones complaining some mysterious 'they' are going to come along and ruin Baba by making him a religion are the very ones doing so before our eyes.

A Brief Talk About the Books We Have By and About Meher Baba

Meher Baba signing front pages of his principal book
"God Speaks" on 18th March 1955 in Satara, India. 

The provenance of written materials we have on Meher Baba's life and teaching bears little resemblance to that of the scant direct evidence we have about the life and teachings of Jesus.

The gospels of Jesus that we have were based on oral tradition and not written down until at least 35 – 40 years after his crucifixion. 

In contrast we have many contemporaneous publications about Baba's life and teaching. These include three biographies of Baba that were actually written during his own lifetime and approved by him. These were The Perfect Master: the life of Shri Meher Baba by Charles Purdom (1937), Avatar by Jean Adriel (1947), and The God-Man by Charles Purdom (1964). In addition, Lord Meher: The Biography of the Avatar Meher Baba, the most exhaustive biography of Baba's life comprising 20 volumes was begun by Baba's close disciple Bhau Kalchuri almost immediately after Baba's passing. Kalchuri began the project by gathering and compiling stories of Baba's life from witnesses all over India, a task that took him over two years. From these notes he began composing the massive biography, and, by working continually was done in the Summer of 1972, just 2 1/2 years after Baba's passing. The entire 20 volume biography was serially published from 1986 – 2001.

Of Baba's teaching, the major books of his teachings were written, copyrighted, and published in his lifetime and by his own management. He even signed them. These include:

God Speaks: The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose, published by Dodd, Mead in 1955. Baba signed 498 copies.

God to Man and Man to God : the discourses of Meher Baba / edited by C.B. Purdom. — London : Gollancz, 1955.

Discourses (numerous editions from 1938 – 1987)

The Everything and the Nothing (1963)

Beams from Meher Baba on the spiritual panorama (1958)

Listen, Humanity (Dodd, Mead, 1957)

Life At Its Best (1957)

Baba filmed while giving a discourse on drugs in 1967

So what is the relevance of this difference between what we have of Christ's life and teaching and what we have of Baba's? In the past it has been a chore for scholars to determine what early Christianity was like, and what parts of it could be attributed to Jesus. 

Recently these kinds of uncertainties have become so great that many have begun to doubt Jesus ever even lived, or if he did if he said any of the things attributed to him in the Bible.

These will not be legitimate concerns for people in the future wondering about what Baba did or said. His is one of the most thoroughly documented lives of a religious leader in history.

In the past, textual scholars were needed to determine what parts of the Bible were truly in the original texts, and of what there was theologians were needed to interpret its meaning. None of this is true with Baba. All that is required for Baba to have the impact he meant to have is for people to read what he left behind and to think about it carefully.

You don't need a textual scholar or a priest to do that for you. It's a much more democratic time. 

Seeking to Understand History from People I Trust

Lately, I have been linking to many debunking videos. I like such videos for what I learned from them. But I am not just interested in watching videos that debunk pseudo-science and pseudo-history. I also enjoy learning about true history. Two of the sources I have enjoyed immensely in recent years are the online discussions by Bart Ehrman and Paul Freedman.

Bart Ehrman is a textual scholar and Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His specialty is the New Testament. View Here.

Paul Freedman is a professor of history at Yale University who specializes in the Middle Ages. View here.

What I like about listening to Dr. Ehrman is that I learn a great deal about the history of the Bible, a field that attracts numerous silly conspiracy theories, but which has long interested me. To my great relief I learned that many of the teachings Christians accept today about their faith do not have their source in Jesus.

What I liked about Dr. Freedman is that I finally learned the facts about the early Middle Ages, a topic missing from most of our educations, and one that has intrigued me ever since I read Francis Brabazon's book Stay With God in which Brabazon writes, "The Dark Ages were the ages of light: the Renaissance was the twilight of our present black night of materialism," which began the process of my waking from old assumptions about history that many of us were taught.

It saddens me that at a time when people can freely listen in on courses once reserved for the Ivy League, most continue to be tantalized by old absurd tropes. One of those tropes is that historians are either part of a conspiracy to deceive humanity, or are too stupid to question what they read. I have found that real historical scholars question what they hear, admit when they are wrong, and honestly want to know and teach what is true.

60 Videos Debunking Nonsense

How to lose friends. Debunk those things people want to believe.

Click image to open playlist. Many people will be offended within a few minutes. That's how popular conspiracies have become.

Debunking Jiang Xueqin

The Chinese Nostrodamus

Supernatural Claims: In interviews, Jiang openly admits that his lecture process does not involve reading historical documentation or conducting traditional archival research. He has stated that his analysis is entirely "speculative" and that he generates his ideas by channeling a higher force. He has even claimed to have been visited by angels to receive insights.

 

44 geopolitical analysts I follow

1. Col. Larry Wilkerson, 

2. Andrei Martanov, 

3. Stanislav Krapivnik, 

4. Sebastian Sas, 

5. Rachel Blevins, 

6. Lena Petrova, 

7. Max Blumenthal, 

8. Scott Ritter, 

9. Glenn Diesen, 

10. Jeffrey Sachs, 

11. Richard Wolff, 

12. Patrick Henningsen, 

13. Caleb Maupin, 

14. Carl Zha, Ben Norton, 

15. Sean Foo, 

16. Mohammad Marandi, 

17. Alastair Crooke, 

18. Laith Marouf, 

19. Michael Hudson, 

20. Warwick Powell, 

21. KJ Noh, 

22. Victor Gao, 

23. Li Jingjing, 

24. Sabby Sabs, 

25. Jamarl Thomas, 

26. Alex Krainer, 

27. Nima R. Alkhorshid, 

28. Danny Haiphong, 

29. Dr. Pascal Lottaz, 

30. Garland Nixon, 

31. Larry Johnson, 

32. Alex Christoforou, 

33. Alexander Mercouris, 

34. Judge Napolitano, 

35. Ray McGovern, 

36. Pepe Escobar, 

37. Col. Douglas Macgregor

38. Chris Hedges,

39. Ted Postol

40. Col. Daniel Davis

41. Rifat Jawaid

42. Robert Barnes

43. Mark Sleboda

44. Chas Freeman

Not everyone in this world is bad.

Dancing on Glass - Shaman

The great song "Dancing on Glass" was written by Maxim Fadeev in 1997 and given a new life by Shaman with his amazing interpretation. The original video got almost 44 million views

Growing Up in the Baba Community

In this video of a talk I gave at the Circle Center in Myrtle Beach on May 14, 2022 I correct some errors about our family history. Filmed by Judy Mangold. The rude man in the back who interrupts is Dennis Wolterding. My talks regularly have hecklers. 

Also see this paper on the same topic.

Gira con Me

Amira Willighagen

"This is My Dream" concert. Filmed August 22, 2020 at the Atterbury Theatre, Pretoria, South Africa. Streamed by OPTOG! September 11-14, 2020

"Gira con Me" (also known as "Gira Con Me Questa Notte") was written by David Foster, Walter Afanasieff, and Lucio Quarantotto. The song was popularized by baritone singer Josh Groban on his self-titled 2001 debut album.