Symbols of the world's religions

               

GOD OVERTAKES HIMSELF

Meher Baba

 
As long as the mind exists the illusion also exists, even up to the very sixth plane, although the type of illusion which exists on each plane may be different. Mind is subject to imagination. It imagines and experiences imagination through places and states which imagination creates.

So long as mind exists, imagination also persists; and the imaginary places, planes, states and experiences also continue to engage the mind. Just as in the gross world there are places, states and experiences, there are imaginary places, states and experiences on the subtle and mental planes. Yet in both cases they belong to the illusion created by imagination.

However, when the illusion exists, there are within it six ingredients viz., time, space, law, nature, cause and effect. Of these six factors, law and nature are most important. Evolution depends on these six factors and its working is clocklike and without any deviation because of the unfailing interplay of these six factors. Although illusion is the product of imagination, the evolutionary working within that illusion goes on exactly as it should. The determinism is complete.

On the seventh plane the mind does not exist. Hence there are no places, states nor experiences in God-realization, just as such places, states and experiences are absent in the infinite unconsciousness. What exists in God-realization of the seventh plane is just uninterrupted and indivisible consciousness, without any form of burden or limitation.

With his back to the false and evanescent and his gaze firmly fixed on the goal of shoreless Divinity, an aspirant traverses the Path through spiritual planes with security if he has the help of a master of wisdom. And when he sheds his illusion completely, he finds that his mysterious sojourn has been from eternity to eternity, from God to Himself. But it is not an arrival at the same point.

In the shoreless Divinity of the eternal reality, there are no dividing points or lines. So you cannot call it a "return." It is a return only in the sense of his having realized his initial limitlessness, but not a return to some imagined point or terminus.

It has been a flight from eternity to eternity, from the shoreless Divinity to the shoreless Divinity, from the unending to the unending. It is a fulfillment that can never become stale. No one may put the seal of finis on this story of the invincible eternal but every one may disappear in it and share its unending and ineffable glory. Through the incident of imaginary creation God overtakes Himself, only to discover that He is limitless in all dimensions.

 

BEAMS FROM MEHER BABA, pp. 86-88
1958 © Sufism Reoriented, Inc.

               

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