Baba and Pantheism

Over the years some people have thought Baba was a pantheist. It is easy to misunderstand Baba as such.

A pantheist is one who holds that God and nature are the same thing, that God essentially is nature. Worship of nature. It has other definitions also.

The following is from a 1932 interview of Baba by James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, held in England. Douglas was reading from a questionnaire he had prepared with the help of the Oriental scholar Sir Edward Ross, which had been prepared partially to see if Baba could be tricked.

Douglas: ‘Is God a Person or a Power?’ 

Baba: ‘God is both personal and impersonal. He is in art, in literature, everything.’

Douglas: ‘Are you a Pantheist?’

Baba: ‘No’, he smiled. ‘When you know God it is plain. The self is one with him at the height experience.’ 

The God Man, new online edition, p. 100.

Sir Edward Ross, Oriental Scholar

I added this because I found someone who did not want to believe Baba was not a pantheist. So — for what it's worth — here it is, in his own words.

Another account of this interview is in Lord Meher, 1986 print edition, p. 1563.

Hearing this, Douglas was about to ask Baba something, but Baba prevented him, indicating that he should first listen to what Baba wanted to say. Continuing, Baba spelled out, "From all this, you should not take it that I am a pantheist. This is not my opinion. In reality, I know everything through experience. You will understand all this when you know God. The highest experience is to know Oneself. It is the supreme experience. It means to be one with God!" (Lord Meher, 1986, p. 1563)

My guess is that the first version is as editor James Douglas wrote up the interview later for the Sunday Express, from which Charles Purdom (who was a friend of his) copied it into his 1964 biography The God Man. The second, from Lord Meher, is from a witness keying an account of the details of the interview. I would put more stock in the Lord Meher account for precise wording as it occurred. It is more like Baba's own manner. The version in Lord Meher of the full account of the interview is quite long, rich, and detailed and written very well. It begins on page 1557 and continues all the way to page 1564.

Acosmism

So if Baba was not a pantheist, what was he? Some have felt that Baba's writing agrees with panentheism, the view that God is in all things, but also transcendent and beyond them. Another interpretation is that his writing is consistent with acosmism, which denies the reality of the Universe, seeing the it as ultimately illusory, and only the infinite unmanifest Absolute as real.