“The Yoga of ‘You Go’”: Meher Baba’s “Ascendant Path” to Nonduality

Abstract

AbstractThis comparative theological article explores Meher Baba’s written Vedāntic teaching he once called “the yoga of ‘you go’” within a cosmological scheme he named “The Divine Theme,” which features in his books God Speaks and The Nothing and the Everything. Following his Vedāntic master, Upasni Maharaj and Sri Rāmakṛṣṇa, Meher Baba innovated on what scholars call the Yoga Advaita traditions. The important features of these lineages that impact his version are mental annihilation or manonāśa and the destruction of impressions or vāsanākṣaya (what he called “unwinding saṃskāras”) in order to liberate the soul while living in a body or jīvanmukti. Further, I map the total arc of Meher Baba’s work and how it fits historically within the Yoga Advaita lineages as they developed from the tenth century CE to the present. There are two basic sides to his work: his written teaching, which consolidates what one commentator calls “the ascendant path of return” to the nondual Self, and his active ministry, which I can only introduce here, which charts new territory for the future in what this commentator calls “the descendant path” of God-realization. I also constructively explore the ways that in The Nothing and the Everything the story of Gaṇeśa’s decapitation and recapitation is used to express, in narrative form, the philosophical treatment in God Speaks. In terms of salvation, Meher Baba’s teaching yields a theology of religious diversity I call “exhaustivism.” This refers to an “exhaustive” scope of learning literally all there is to learn in creation as each form in creation, including every kind of religious possibility in the human phase of reincarnation, a use of energy in each stage of the cosmic growth process that is “exhausting,” and finally, it refers to a difficult final stage of return to the divine that is marked by safely disposing of the saṃskāric “exhaust” generated in this evolution. Lastly, I offer some topics for further study in his Divine Theme that include the nature of human life and death, as well as the role of religions, God-realized masters or “Man-Gods,” and Meher Baba himself as the “God-Man” or Avatāra.