When I was a kid I was always creative. I used to make things out of cardboard and draw pictures. When I was 18 I wanted to be an animator. That led to live action filmmaking for a long time. When I was almost 40 I began studying philosophy. I got an M.A. and wrote a short book about an idea I had been considering since I was a kid and finally had the opportunity to discuss with professors in graduate school. I published it in 2004 as The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance; A Simper Theory of Everything.
For a long time I set that project aside, feeling I had covered it well enough. I then began to focus a lot of my attention on writing about Meher Baba, whose works had had a big influence on me in my youth and influenced my ideas. I began by helping write Wikipedia articles about Baba and several related topics, before starting a blog dedicated to Baba trivia called Meher Baba Thoughts. Eventually I ran out of things to say about Baba and the blog slowly morphed into a site dedicated to the young Dutch/South African soprano Amira Willighagen and other rising musical stars. You can still find that blog with all those posts here.
During the same period that I was writing about Amira I wrote and published a second book clarifying the idea in my first. I titled it Evolution of Perception Re-Explained. It can be purchased on Amazon here, but can also be downloaded for free here.
About the time I was finishing that book, I began uploading videos about it and related topics. All of those videos (and several favorites I uploaded of Amira as well) can be found on my official YouTube channel here.
After that I focussed on fleshing out a series of short articles clarifying certain things about the concept of an evolution of perception plus points I wanted to make about Meher Baba’s teaching I felt were not well understood by his followers, and some clarification about how Baba’s cosmology and the evolution of perception are related.
But now, for the time being at least, I feel I have done enough to explain myself. Like with the blog I once again feel out of things to say. Every time I start a new paper or begin to plan a new YouTube video it occurs to me that I’ve already expressed whatever it was about.
I’m nearly out of new things to say. So I may retire from publishing my ideas for a while. However, I have one more thing I want to add and end on. It is about something that is often on my mind, the future of the Baba world.
While I have a bit to say on this topic, it is not really my field of training. So I begin by quoting AI to describe the field this topic belongs to, called religiology.
The study of religions, cults, and sects falls under Religious Studies (or Religiology), often approached through disciplines like Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, and History, with the specific study of newer groups called New Religions Studies (NRS), focusing on how they differ from established religions using typologies like Church-Sect-Cult. While "cult" and "sect" can be neutral terms for scholars, they often study these groups sociologically as types of religious organizations, or through an anti-cult lens focusing on manipulation.
Because religion is not my field of study, if it is yours please forgive me if I use the wrong terminology for categories like “folk religions,” “cults,” “sects,” etc. I think what I’m trying to communicate will be clear enough. However, terms that I use like “Baba lover,” “Baba community” and “Baba family,” while likely unfamiliar to those in the field conventionally, are definitely correct terminology as used by followers of Baba. I’ll now begin.
I was born in upstate New York. Our family heard of Meher Baba in 1964. We were one of the earliest Baba families in the United States, among about 250 followers at the time. For a brief talk I gave on the demographics of American Baba lovers over the years see the first ten minutes of this video.
In 1966 our family moved to the Meher Center in Myrtle Beach, SC where I grew up. As the American Baba community grew, literally thousands came through the Center, inevitably visiting our house there and dining at our long teak table. So I have been in close proximity with the American Baba lovers for more than 60 years. So I should know what I’m talking about when I describe them.
As an adult I moved about the country, living for a time in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Jersey City, Seattle, and Arkansas, where my daughter now lives. In all of these I was in touch with the local Baba communities there.
Now, how to categorize the Baba community/followers/lovers/movement? The term “cult” bears connotations that don’t really apply. The Baba lovers don’t have a cult leader, have no rules, don’t collect fees, and in fact don’t even have membership rolls because there’s nothing to join. In fact, I have talked over the years to numerous Baba lovers who question the very term “Baba lover.” “What is a Baba lover,” they ask. A Baba friend and I discuss this very issue in this video recorded at the Meher Baba Circle Center in the mall across the street from the Meher Center in Myrtle Beach.
In case you’re wondering, Ben and I and my daughter Megan are examples of living “Baba lovers” with families who don’t mind being called that, and feel comfortable defining the term. A Baba lover is simply someone who believes Baba’s claim of being the avatar, tries to follow his teachings, and identifies as a Baba lover. It’s not more complicated than that. It’s a form of self-identification and helps to serve as a term to identify others that follow Baba. As far as I can tell the term comes from Family Letters from Baba’s various secretaries in the last decade of Baba’s life. Baba himself appears to have referred to these as simply “my lovers.”
So “cult” is not applicable generally, though some academics still use it for the group, though without negative associations. See Getting Straight with Meher Baba: A Study of Drug-Rehabilitation, Mysticism, and Post-Adolescent Role Conflict, by Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1972.
The next term to consider is “sect.” My understanding is that in religious studies a sect is a subgroup of a larger conventional religion such as Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism. Hardly anyone could make a good case that Baba lovers are a subgroup of another religion. Baba virtually starts over, though occasionally syncretizes his terminology with esoteric terms from religious traditions like Islamic Sufism and Vedanta.
Next is the somewhat modern term “new religious movement.” This is probably the most appropriate academic term one could use, with some caveats. First, Baba lovers are determined to uphold Baba’s stance on not intending to establish a new religion. See this video for the actual words Baba literally spelled out on his alphabet board for Paramount newsreel cameras in London in 1932.
The second problem with the term “new religious movement” is that it is unclear that it is a movement anymore, at least in the United States. Maybe there is one happening in other countries, but I have no information on this and can’t speak on it. There was definitely a kind of small movement of about three thousand people who came to Baba in America in the late 60s, throughout the 70s, and right up to the early 80s. But numbers have since ceased to grow and now slowly decline as a result of death, attrition, and a failure to attract younger people.
So none of these conventional terms apply to it. I simply call them “the Baba lovers” or “the Baba people.” They are hard to categorize. But let me give it a try.
As I said, they aren’t a sect because they did not break off from another religion. And they do not like to be called a religion of their own. We might disagree with them and call them a new religious movement. After all, their beliefs and practices do share many traits with traditional religions. These include belief in God and soul, a unique Cosmology, faith in the the promise of a reoccurring figure (avatar) that is common to most religions, sacred texts like Meher Baba’s principal books God Speaks and Discourses, as well as pilgrimage and prayers.
But I wish to show why the term most fitting the Baba lovers is a “folk religion.”
A traditional religion is organized, scriptural, and led by authorities (like churches/mosques), focusing on cosmic questions, while folk religion is the informal, local, and cultural beliefs/practices of ordinary people, often blending with major faiths, lack texts or are not interested in them, and focused on daily life issues like health or ancestors, passed down orally. A folk religion arises organically to fill psychological and emotional needs of the people who form and practice them. They are also decentralized, while traditional religion is centralized, text-based, and doctrinal.
Most folk religions share many traits with Baba lovers. Examples of folk religion include Chinese Folk Religion (ancestor worship, Taoist/Buddhist mix), Japanese Shintoism, and Haitian Vodou.
If the Baba people were a religion, they would take their beliefs from their sacred texts. The reason in the past that religions eventually became more rigid and centralized was to stave off the inevitable drift into folk religion, where human sentiment and psychological needs dominate. In the past, fathers of a faith worked to codify what their beliefs actually were, anchoring them in sacred texts. Examples are the apostles creed, established by the Unified Christian Church around the 7th-8th centuries, Adi Shankara who codified the form of Hinduism known as Advaita Vedanta in the 8th century, and the codified theology and jurisprudence (Sharia) of Shia Islam developed over centuries, heavily influenced by the teachings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law Ali and his descendants, particularly the sixth Imam, Ja'far al-Sadiq, who established key principles for deriving laws.
But in actual practice and belief the baba lovers are very diverse, led largely by personal taste and prejudices brought to the group from traditions they gathered on the way to Baba. These include Theosophy, Neo-paganism, New Age beliefs, the Counter-culture of the 1960s, a general anti-Christian sentiment, and most recently the Archaic Revival of the 1990s. These influence their thinking as much as the writings of Meher Baba, if not more, although they are usually not aware of it.
Even when they appeal to Baba’s written works they inadvertently fall into doing eisegesis, i.e., reading into a text what you want it to say.
Some of the beliefs and practices extremely common in the Baba world find no basis in Baba’s teaching, and in fact were criticized by Baba, but are brought to the group from Theosophy, Neo-paganism, and other traditions. They include belief in Baba as a spirit that was inside his body during his lifetime, but left it after he died and continues to watch over and govern the world from another world, dimension, in another nonphysical form, or as a spirit listening to prayers.
This belief is an amalgam of Greek mythology, Neoplatonist theurgy, folk ancestor worship, belief in transmigration (transportation of souls), New Age belief in walk-ins, and New Age ascended master teachings.
When confronted with many things Baba asserted, Baba lovers take an opposing view, siding instead with popular culture, saying he was lying or misinformed. For example, in 1962 Baba said men would go to the moon and plant their flag on it, and in 1963 he told his mandali that Oswald had killed Kennedy on his own. In my experience American Baba followers disagree on both these points, preferring to believe in commonly held conspiracy theories. Baba said the Earth is a sphere, yet there are Baba lovers who, in spite of Baba, prefer the conspiracy theory that it is flat.
Belief in theories like these, which are not supported in Baba’s own writing in his lifetime, are so strong and emotionally held that I have literally been told I’m “stupid” for believing Baba’s word on matters like these, and this by people who say they are Baba followers.
Now, on more important metaphysical matters, Baba lovers show the same disinterest in what Baba had to say about what happens when an Avatar drops his physical form. See my paper Where is Baba Now? here.
This I have discussed over and over in blogs and videos, pointing to the sources, and yet the preference for the ridiculous superstition that he continues to haunt the world and visit people, and can be invoked for aid in material affairs prevails. This is an almost universal belief in all folk religions. But has no corollary in the theologies of any of the major religions. And it is definitely not what Baba taught.
How do I conclude this paper and perhaps this entire series?
Such a folk religion would seem rather harmless normally. After all, this belief in Baba as an imaginary friend, an ascended master who sometimes grants your wishes and sometimes doesn’t, who lives somehow in another world, that appears to people in visions and dreams, is a comforting one. No doubt it assuages anxieties and provides comfort to many. I personally admire the faith and sincerity of some people with such beliefs. But the pity of it is that, by de-emphasizing Baba’s own words, and substituting them with these Neo-pagan ideas for their psychological appeal, Baba’s actual central teaching of Oneness is almost entirely lost sight of.
For example, a Baba follower several times described to me a thought he believed was profound. He said our suffering is really God’s fault, because God had the Original Whim that made the world. So our sins are not really our fault. The paradox, he said, was that it nonetheless falls upon us to pay the price. It’s not fair, he mused thoughtfully, but It’s just how it is.
This is a total misunderstanding of what Baba taught. In Baba’s teaching everything comes out of the Original Whim, but we are all really God and thus that whim is our own. The apparent separation that this man believes is real, is in Baba’s teaching only that, apparent. There is no God somewhere that made the world as we find it and we who have to pay the price. Such thinking comes from this man’s Abrahamic background, and he’s projected it only Baba. Nothing like this so-called paradox is found in Baba’s own words, but it shows how this notion of separation has been preserved as if it’s philosophy. Baba said God did not actually create the world, but its fantastical appearance is the product of impressions, and thus it is we who created it in our own ignorance.
Who says GOD has created this world? We have created it by our own imagination. (Meher Baba, Awakener Magazine, 1:2 p. 11)
The Original Whim, in other words, is really our own.
I’ve tried to address these confusions in my writing and correct them as best I can. It’s possible that this will never be corrected, and the Baba lovers, who so earnestly thought they were avoiding creating a real religion, wound up creating a folk one, hardly any different from the many folk religions around the world.
It’s very ironic. Because Baba lovers have over the years repeated a trope that goes, “They’re gonna make it a religion.” And they sigh like it is an unavoidable travesty that an undefined ‘they’ will stupidly do in the near future. The irony is that this ‘they’ that these Baba lovers dread is themselves.
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