This brief explanation is meant to be a resource for my blogs on racial justice and Sufism Reoriented.
One can do no better than read Meher Baba’s explanations about what he called “The Divine Theme,” which is his explanation of the beginning, growth, and destiny of creation through the stages of “Creation, Evolution, Reincarnation, Involution and Realization.” See especially God Speaks, pp. 220-228 and the accompanying charts.
Meher Baba’s teaches in God Speaks, the Discourses, and The Nothing and the Everything a progressive understanding of karma and rebirth that leads to God-Realization for all souls without exception, which like all other Dharma traditions (Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and Buddhist), takes a long view of human growth through many lifetimes. However, unlike these other traditions which may teach that the number of lives one lives are indefinite and the direction may be regressive or progressive based on virtuous or vicious actions in a given life, Baba teaches that the trajectory of this extremely long development has a set number of lives, is always progressive (except in one case), and the key to its unfolding drama is the notion of “winding and unwinding of impressions” or saṃskāras in Sanskrit.
Meher Baba writes that all souls begin as unconscious God and finish as conscious God but in between gain this conscious state by building it over unimaginable spans of time. Baba writes that each soul can be compared to a drop of the Infinite Ocean of Divinity. The separation between the “drop-soul” and the Infinite Ocean is in reality imaginary. In the process of creation, each soul “loses” its identity with the Infinite Oversoul and imagines that it is finite in a long series of forms, though that series is followed in a progressive manner. It first becomes every form in every kingdom in biological evolution, one at a time, from the gas kingdom, to the stone, metal, plant, insect and worm, fish, bird, and animal kingdoms. During this process the soul gathers or “winds” the saṃskāras or impressions that hold the level of consciousness achieved in each form like a net. God Speaks defines saṃskāras as
“impressions which are left on the soul as memories from former lives, and which determine one’s desires and actions in the present lifetime.” (p. 296).
This process of evolving consciousness happens through 50.4 million forms in the natural word. The general rule is that once a “sanskaric” net is formed, it cannot be unformed, therefore, once a level of consciousness is achieved, that consciousness cannot be lost. When those 50.4M forms are mastered, each soul then becomes a human being and incarnates in 8.4 million human lives exploring every possible permutation of being a human (becoming each sex, every sexual orientation, ability, class, ethnicity, religion, morality, etc.). After this set number of human lives, the soul has experienced all possible combination of saṃskāra that was inherited from the animal kingdom and is ready to “unwind” them back to God. This is a difficult process that Meher Baba called “involution” and is also called the spiritual path of return to God that proceeds in seven stages through the “subtle” sphere and then the “mental” sphere (see chart above). Meher Baba said that
“[t]hese seven stages of gradual involution of the consciousness of God in the man state may be compared with the wide-open eyes of a man, at first gazing straight ahead of him and away from him. Then, in an attempt to behold his own self, he lowers his eyes gradually, shifting them in seven stages, until eventually his range of vision includes his own self” (God Speaks, p. 114).
Involution comprises a much smaller (though still substantial number) of human lifetimes than 8.4M, when one returns to God traversing seven spiritual planes of consciousness: the first three planes are in the subtle world, the fourth on the cusp of the subtle and mental world, and the last two planes are stationed in the mental world.
For Meher Baba, learning is always progressive. In other words, one can never go backwards except in one seemingly bizarre case: when one reaches what he calls the 4th plane of consciousness, where one has mastered the planes of God’s Infinite Energy in the subtle sphere, but is on the threshold of God’s Infinite Mind and its “full blast of intense desires and emotions” in the mental sphere (God Speaks, 44). This is the true “Dark Night of the Soul” as St. John of the Cross called it, where the tremendous Infinite Desire tempts the misuse of the Infinite Energy. If this misuse happens, Meher Baba writes that
“the experience of liberating this infinite energy invariably proves fatal at this juncture for the soul on the fourth plane. The result is that all of the consciousness gained by the soul is violently disintegrated, and the soul retains only the most finite consciousness and identifies itself once again with the stone-form. This soul then has to pass through the whole process of evolution from the stone-form onward to regain full consciousness” as a human being” (God Speaks, 45).
Baba assures his readers that this disintegration is very, very rare since souls stationed on the 5th plane of consciousness have the responsibility to mentor and protect the 4th plane soul, seeing to her or his advancement without peril. However, if it happens, going back to the stone form is not a form of punishment but a reaction.
In terms of the drama of this transition from the 4th plane to the 5th plane of consciousness, one might think of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and its story of the one ring of power that can rule all but not without corrupting its possessor, awakening unmanageable desire. Sauron, the Lord of the Rings, might be compared to a 4th-plane soul unable to use the ring’s power for growth, but is mastered by its raw and overwhelming force. The character Tom Bombadil is the true master of this ring of power, someone that we may say is at least on the 5th plane of consciousness in Meher Baba’s system, a pilgrim of the higher Mind and its Infinite desires and emotions. He could wear the ring with no negative effect and even make it disappear and reappear at will for Frodo the Hobbit who was its bearer, tasked with destroying it in the fires of Mount Doom. Frodo might be thought of a veiled pilgrim on the path of return to God, traversing the treacherous 4th plane into the 5th, though not tempted in the same way as Sauron owing to the mercy of his being veiled from the “full blast of intense desires and emotions” in the mental sphere. I always thought it a tragic mistake to not include Tom Bombadil in Peter Jackson’s films since he is the very goal of the story, someone who has passed on from the lessons of the ring of power. (Meher Baba loved this trilogy, by the way, having it read to him by his sister Mani).
Related to the Christian understanding of the afterlife, Meher Baba teaches that heaven and hell exist as provisional states on the 2nd plane of consciousness that each soul in the “winding” phase experiences in between human lives to “digest” one’s previous life on the gross plane. Depending on the “digestion,” the experience can be heavenly or hellish. Heaven or hell are important to experience the full force of one’s love and/or lack of love and to learn from this before one incarnates for the next life and its lessons or karma. God Speaks defines karma as “action. Fate. The natural and necessary happenings in one’s lifetime, preconditioned by one’s past lives” (p. 289). Heaven and Hell are not necessary for souls fully engaged in the unwinding phase since they are doing “life reviews,” as it were, while alive, and processing many lives in one. In Meher Baba’s own words:
“This state of the soul, in the apparent gap between death and birth, is generally called hell or heaven, and this process of intermittent association and dissociation of consciousness of the conscious soul in human-form, now fully conscious, is termed the “Reincarnation Process.”
“If the predominant counterpart of the impressions of opposites (such as virtue and vice, good and evil, male and female, etc.), as experienced by the soul now associated only with the subtle and mental, is of virtue or goodness (i.e., the positive aspect of the opposite impressions), then the soul is said to be in heaven. If it is of vice or evil (i.e., the negative aspect of opposite impressions), then the soul is said to be in hell.
“The states of heaven and hell are nothing but states of intensive experiences of the consciousness of the soul, experiencing either of the predominant counterparts of the opposite impressions while the soul is dissociated from the gross human body or form. The soul itself does not go to heaven or hell, as is the general belief, because it is eternally infinite and eternally in the Over-Soul. It is the consciousness of the soul which experiences the impressions.
“As soon as the predominant counterpart of impressions is experienced and exhausted, and just when equilibrium is about to be maintained between the opposites of impressions of the last human-form that was dropped, at this juncture the soul automatically associates with the next-most human-form, moulded of the consolidated impressions of opposites which were about to be in a state of equilibrium.
“Thus the gross consciousness of the soul, after experiencing either hell or heaven, associates with the next human-form (takes another birth) to experience and exhaust the residual opposite impressions of the last birth. As has already been said, this next human-form of the soul is nothing but the consolidated mould of the residual opposite impressions of the last form” (God Speaks, 34).