Craig Ruff is a poet and writer who has lived in Ahmednagar, India, and worked at the Avatar Meher Baba Trust Office since 1978.
In his first book, Traveling Music, Craig presented a collection of poems that created an atmosphere of intimacy of love for God as the Beloved.
His second book, The Moment Within, provides a straightforward expression of spiritual thought and inspiration for daily life.
Craig is now writing another book of spiritual reflections, to be entitled Oneness In the World. The following passage is an excerpt from this work in progress.
After many years of trying to serve Avatar Meher Baba, His mandali, and the Avatar Meher Baba Trust through alert and efficient action, I was brought through the circumstances of Bhau's first hospitalization in Poona last year to re-evaluate my overall understanding of the spiritual life. My own sentiments, definitions, cherished perspectives, and finally my own misunderstood and unfulfilled experience were all reconsidered in order to find a truer understanding of selfless service.
Immersed in this process, I entered yet again another phase of life which led me to a broader perspective. It was time to change the emphasis of my actions. I felt I needed to shift my focus in Meher Baba's service from "what I do" to "how I do what I do." In other words, build upon the efficiently done action for His Cause by adding to it qualities from the heart. The following analogy came to mind that symbolized what I needed and wanted to express in my life.
Efficiency is necessary for intelligent action and is like the foundation of a building. But a foundation is only a part of a completed building and being open to the elements it is cold. Only when the foundation is built upon is it warm. Likewise to make the foundation of efficiency warm, I perceived that it was necessary for me to build upon it by putting the qualities of the heart which Meher Baba talks about into action. The heart would have its play through the course of the efficient action by expressing a moment of patience, followed by a moment of kindness, followed by a moment of dispassion, followed by a moment of self-control and on and on. By doing so, I felt the separative ego naturally would get effaced, because qualities of the heart express directly and indirectly the hidden truth of the oneness of life.
Every place has its currency of exchange. Of course, for the world it is the currency of money. I observed that sometimes in my daily life my currency was reduced to an exchange of information with others, neglecting the possibility of basing my interactions on what may lead to an inner life. But I began to recognize that if I changed my currency to the expression of inner values which Meher Baba talks of, I may well be on the way to a realistic expression of "The New Humanity." This new currency of exchange would allow me to appreciate others as they express qualities of the heart. And through that active appreciation begin to sense and maybe even feel the truth of the inner oneness with others.
At last it seemed to me that I could build upon the foundation of years of efficient service in Meher Baba's Cause--building upon the service-oriented mind, the spirit-glimpsing heart. And by doing so, gradually and eventually the balance between mind and heart would be completed and ornamented from the inside with the truth of the spiritual oneness of all life.
From this observation came a stream of other thoughts. To look at myself I also had to look at the community I live in. I recalled a discourse of Meher Baba's entitled "The Task for Spiritual Workers," and as I read it and took its truth to heart, it occurred to me that as His discourse states, the most important work to be done for Meher Baba was to make work spiritual work. That the most important stand to take is the stand on the inner truth of our Oneness and to express that truth through a tolerance that grows into genuine kindness. According to this discourse, if we all take up this challenge of attempting to lovingly instill the feeling of Oneness in our daily circumstances, from the casual moment to the crisis situation, we will be fulfilling our role in the divine cause as "spiritual workers." When we do allow our heart's radiant intimacy of inner communion with Baba to release its lustre into outer life, it will kindle one heart after another with the visible light of truth called harmony. As each of us consistently chooses to affirm in one way or another the truth of the spiritual oneness of life, a social environment will be created amongst us that will reveal and express the internal spiritual connection that has already been bestowed upon us by Baba. In this environment the obvious and less obvious forms of competition, conflict and rivalry will be perceived and felt as obsolete expressions of human personality, simply because they restrict the flow of harmonious love which is now rightly valued as all-important. Then the truth of Baba's statements that "through divine love the New Humanity will learn the art of co-operative and harmonious life" and "in the light of the Truth of unity of all life, co-operative and harmonious action becomes natural and inevitable" will become manifest. When this is accomplished by us all, it will evoke a new social direction establishing the art and culture of co-operative and harmonious living. Individually it will be perfected with artistic delicacy in our communications with one another and collectively it will be a shining cultural achievement of our community life.
From the discourse entitled "The Travail of the New World Order, Baba states the transformations that humanity will undergo. He tells us that, "To perceive the spiritual value of oneness is to promote real unity and co-operation. Brotherhood then becomes a spontaneous outcome of true perception. The new life which is based upon spiritual understanding is an affirmation of the Truth. It is not something which belongs to utopia, but is completely practical." Here is the assurance by Baba that what He is asking of us is not utopian or unrealistic or wishful thinking but is in all respects from top to bottom totally practical, because it is based upon what is true.
Baba gives us very clear and specific direction as how to proceed in upholding the truth of oneness. And in knowing human nature, Baba also gives us some warnings as how not to create divisions amongst ourselves. Returning to the discourse, "The Task for Spiritual Workers," Baba says, "When you launch upon your spiritual work you will be entering a field of divisions to which people desperately cling, which they accentuate and which they strive to perpetuate consciously or unconsiously. Mere condemnation of these divisions will not enable you to destroy them. The divisions are being nourished by separative thinking or feeling, which can yield only to the touch of love and understanding. You have to win people to the life of Truth; you cannot coerce them into spirituality."
Baba also tells us how a social life and even a civilization based upon the inner truth of the oneness of life will function in His discourse "The Infinity of Truth." Baba says: "In spiritual infinity all comparison is out of place. There is no smaller or greater, or hierarch of claims, privileges and rights, and valuation remains unclouded because of the unmarred perception of The One in each and all. Since everyone in creation is not only in spiritual infinity, but is that indivisible spiritual infinity, then everyone is first in importance and no one is second. In social life the recognition of the spiritual infinity of the Truth will mean a challenge to individualism as well as collectivism. It initiates a new way of thinking in terms of an indivisible totality and it discards all the relative values of comparison in favour of the recognition of the intrinstic worth of everything. In a civilization based upon a true idea of the spiritual infinity of the Truth, there will be no problem of majority and minority, of rivalry and competition, and of those comparisons and laborious assessments which so often become a shelter for pride and separative ego. Life then will be infinitely simple and integral, because the illusions which create rifts and complexities will all have disappeared."
When manyness is our individual viewpoint, there is unending personal confusion, and when this perspective runs rampant amongst us all, it is the source of social chaos. The only direction out of the maze of manyness is to remove all the barriers in the maze that we have created, by dismantling them invisibly through the active faith in Oneness. This will very naturally invite a new individual and social dynamic which will provoke a remarkable turn in our development. The turn is towards The One behind the many and it will gradually reorient our experience.
What preceeds this truth as being our shared living experience is to have living faith in it. Living faith in the truth of the unity of all life is the essential ingredient in the development of individual and community life. In the discourse "Qualifications of the Aspirant" on faith, Baba says, "It is because of faith that co-operative and social life becomes possible. It is faith in each other that facilitates a free give and take of love, a free sharing of work and its results." As our faith deepens to intuit the inner truth of our oneness, all our activities that deviate from this truth will be re-aligned towards it.
However, as we do so, we all need to be careful not to think that unity means the same thing as equality. There can never be equality in the world because by its very nature every object, person, and circumstance is God's unique way of expressing and overcoming limitation of its own infinite being. When we profess the idealism of equality, it may perhaps be our unconscious desire for the Truth of Oneness that is trying to speak through us. With this understanding the noble aspiration for equality will be superseded by the quiet strength to uphold the truth of the hidden spiritual unity in and through the world of numberless differences, and by doing so it is love that will be shared with all because all are undeniably One Spirit.
To this problem of identifying equality with unity, Meher Baba says in the discourse "The Nature of the Ego and Its Termination--Part Three," "Although the sense of equality is made the basis of many social and political ideals, the real conditions of rich co-operative life are fulfilled only when the bare idea of equalilty is replaced by the realization of the unity of all life."
This realization should not be mistaken by us for God realization, and therefore thought impossible to attain. The realization of the unity of all life is within the reach of everyone because it comes to the heart in love with Meher Baba as Beloved. As it becomes the emblematic guiding light for all our activity, the truth of spiritual oneness gradually is perceived and felt. It will be the patient and warm understanding that makes community life possible and eventually flourish. It will be the sweet reference point prio