Channeling Meher Baba

Bhau Kalchuri, last living mandali of Meher Baba, now deceased

Glow International: Some Meher Baba lovers are caught up in the web of channeling, asserting that Meher Baba speaks through certain individuals or disembodied spirits. Some even claim that Meher Baba speaks to them from beyond.

Bhau Kalchuri: Meher Baba made it very clear that channeling, and there are so many people who do it, is not proper, it is not honest.

     —Glow International, Aug. 2003, p. 7

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The following interview with Meher Baba is from Channeling Erik (dot) com. Group sessions cost $20.00. Do not think this is a joke. A recent book by the webmaster of the fabulously popular Channeling Erik (dot) com was published by Simon and Schuster.

Happy Celebrity Friday everyone! Because I received so many requests from blog members for me to channel Meher Baba, I obediently complied. Enjoy his wisdom.

I also want to give you a follow up on my Healing Perspective exercise. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, please read it HERE. I’ve been going through the recreated story every day, and I can’t tell you how amazing it’s been. When I think of the loss of Erik’s body and the tragic life he led before he died, I’m no longer gripped with that intense sadness which caused me to limp through life before. I also added a part: I imagine him sitting beside me on the couch, smiling, and we hug each other for a long time. I feel his euphoria and that feeling spills into me. It’s lovely. I hope you try all of this and relive the story every day. 

Me: Meher Baba, so many of my blog members love you. I’ve gotten so many requests for me to interview you!

Meher: I’m just delighted to see you. I’m just delighted!

Me: Aw!

Robert (chuckling): He seems giddy.

Me: I understood, early on after Erik’s transition, that he was your pupil for a while. Is that true?

Robert: Erik was a pupil of Meher Baba?

Me: Yeah.

Robert: Erik never mentioned that to me.

Erik: Yeah, but it’s true.

Me: Was he an unruly student?

Meher: Well. I’ll be honest. He needs a little discipline.

I envision Baba banishing Erik to the corner with a dunce cap on.

Robert and I roar with laughter.

Me: What did you teach him?

(Pause)

Me (chuckling): And did he pass?

Meher: All my students pass. There is no failing.

Robert (laughing): I like the way he answered that.

Me: I wish I had had him as a teacher! Okay, I guess we’ll start with the questions. First, what was your spiritual mission here?

Meher: Christianity is something a lot of people identify with. There are a lot of Christians in the world. When you talk about Christ—and I’m not saying I can compare myself with Christ, because I was a completely different person—but we both spoke the same message which was love and acceptance, but I also got a little bit more into the discipline side of things.

Me: Mm hm.

Meher: I tried to teach people that sometimes discipline is necessary in order for those who don’t know what their boundaries are to help them identify them.

Robert: Whenever I’ve channeled him before, he uses the word “lamb” a lot. He says, “My flock” and “My lambs” and stuff.

Meher: The reason I chose that is because when you think of a lamb, you don’t allow them to roam around freely in the pasture without a shepherd watching over them. If you allow them to roam free, they can get injured.

Me: Yeah, or eaten!

Meher: Yes, eaten by a wolf or some other predator, and when the shepherd is not there, you keep them within a fence. That is a metaphor for discipline.

Me: Right.

Meher: Discipline keeps you safe, but you need to know sometimes I went a little overboard with my discipline; I’ll admit that.

Me: Ah.

Meher: And when I say, “overboard” I mean more so in my projection of my emotions that I felt inside. Some of my disciples thought I was genuinely furious or angry. All of that came from my own personal lessons of dealing with frustration with seeing the truth, wanting to guide people in a certain direction and then having to deal with their own ability to have free will.

Robert laughs.

Me: Yeah, that free will thing can be a booger. Erik, is that one of the reasons that you were a pupil of his? Did you have to learn your boundaries and acquire that discipline early on?

Erik: Yes and no. When I lived my life as Erik—you know this, Mom—in dealing with bipolar disease, you just don’t know what your boundaries are, because your emotions are so extreme, but the way boundaries helped in my life was a lesson in the appreciation of boundaries and being able to recognize them more quickly. I developed this emotional connection with boundaries. It’s outside of intellect. It’s an emotional thing. It helps strengthen boundaries.

Me: Hmm.

Erik: But yes, I needed more training in it. The “no” part when I crossed over was just being able to remind myself of the things I didn’t necessarily get right away—things I already knew but had forgotten. Meher Baba helped me to reconnect with that. Then after that, you know, when you hang out with your friends and you talk about the same things?

Me: Okay.

Erik: It’s that kind of connection.

Me: Ah! So, Baba, your spiritual mission was to teach both love and discipline?

Meher: Love and discipline. Maybe a better word that’s not as loaded is boundaries.

Me: Okay. Teaching love and boundaries. Were you here to learn anything?

Meher: We’re always here to learn something. Sometimes the teacher must learn what they’re here to teach. In teaching others love and boundaries, I was also here to teach myself that to a great degree but on a different level of awareness. It goes back to what Erik was saying about fine-tuning, and some of the lessons that came up for me in that process were, for instance, dealing with frustration. Sometimes I would relay things to people that would come across as very hostile when really that was not my intention at all. Some of my followers were afraid of me sometimes.

Robert: He’s being so honest!

Meher: Yes, I could have a temper.

Robert: He’s talking about back problems.

Meher: It’s not so easy to be understanding and patient when you’re in pain.

Me: So, he had back problems?

Robert: I didn’t know that.

Meher: And that was a lesson in responsibility. I didn’t learn that until later. I was taking too much on my shoulders.

Me: So, you were taking other people’s responsibilities on your back, your shoulders?

Meher: Yes, partly, but this was more that I felt alone. There was no other peer that I could call on. When you’re the only one up there on the mountain, and there’s no one to call on—

Me: That’s a lot of responsibility.

Meher: It doesn’t really matter if you recognize that responsibility should be shared; it can still affect your physically. For me—

Robert: I guess he had some sort of accident that aggravated the back pain or something. I guess that was the catalyst for him to recognize the lesson of responsibility.

Me: Do you feel like you accomplished everything you were here to learn and teach?

Meher: When I exited life in the physical form, the work that I could do up to that point was done, but work never ends. As soon as I became reoriented to my true self, my true form—our true form—I got right back to work again.

Me: Okay. Can you share another life that influenced this last one?

Meher: It related very much to being a teacher, but –

Robert: I’ve heard this one before, but I’m not very familiar with it—Sufi?

Me: S-u-f-i, right?

Robert: I guess so. He shows me a visual of him as a young man practicing Sufism. I guess that’s what it’s called.

Me: I think it is.

Robert: He was getting connected with loving everything, every experience, the good and the bad.

Meher: That’s the way you learn to fully embrace love. You can embrace what is regardless of the label you put on it. If you place conditions on it, then you’re not really living in love. That life prepared me for that.

Robert: I just see him sitting down. I don’t know if in Sufism they meditate, but in the image he gave me, that’s what he seems to be doing. He was sitting alone, but he also shows me images of them dancing. There’s lots of joy.

Meher: Think of the priesthood and nuns in particular. Nuns talk about being married to God. With Sufism, that’s what it is. It doesn’t matter if you’re male or female. It’s like you’re married to God.

Me: Which means what?

Meher: It’s to get you to become comfortable with attachment, to be connected to something, tied to something or someone. That’s very necessary. Love has two sides to it. It has the attachment part of it, which is perpetual because we’re all connected to each other, and then there’s the detachment side to love, which is about recognizing that, even though we are all connected, that doesn’t mean we have to take on someone else’s burdens. If someone else is in pain, that doesn’t mean we have to become pain also. Sometimes you have to love someone enough to let them struggle. Also, you have to be detached from how they’re feeling if that’s not the way you want to feel. If you’re too attached to what they’re feeling, and you’re not detached from it, then you might not recognize what that person needs.

Me: Okay. Here are some from a blog member: “I respect Baba very much, but for the sake of understanding, I need to ask this question. Baba spent much of his life bragging about how great he was, yet in his boundless consciousness, he felt no personal ego. You proclaimed to the world, “No one loves me as much as I deserve to be loved.”

Meher: That sounds a lot like hypocrisy, doesn’t it?

Me: Yes!

Robert: He’s trying to choose his words carefully.

Me: Oh, and the blog member also wants to know if enlightenment can be an excuse for bragging.

Meher: I never professed to being the most humble person. Everyone thinks that with love and discipline comes humility. I had that to a certain degree, but I didn’t have that in love of self. I was also, in those moments, trying to show people that emotional honesty is about being kind to yourself and being kind to others.

(Pause)

Robert: He’s just kind of sitting here thinking for a minute.

Meher: It’s also a very good lesson in reverse psychology. Sometimes you have to do the opposite of what it is that you want other people to do, but I will tell you that in the moment of saying those things I didn’t realize that that’s what I was doing. I was just trying to profess that we, as human beings living on this earth, just don’t have the capability to love another person in the way that we can love ourselves, because we only truly know ourselves. We know ourselves like no one else can. Whether we can admit what we know about ourselves or how we love ourselves is another story. You can be blind to that but still be unconsciously aware of it.

Me: Yeah, as a human, there are barriers that prevent us from totally opening up to others. It’s really hard to be completely vulnerable with others, and, when you can’t, it’s difficult to truly and thoroughly know that other person. I can imagine that can be a barrier to love, too. Okay, here’s another question. “Baba, when you were alive, you condemned your lovers—I don’t know if this blog member meant “followers”—from indulging in any occult practices like contacting the spirit world using mediums, but you came to many people after you died. So, how do you come to terms with that?”

Meher: It’s just another lesson in discipline. There are many people who, if they pursue the occult, for instance, and don’t have well-established boundaries, they can set themselves up for challenges that they didn’t necessarily need to go through.

Me: Like?

Meher: That’s what I was doing. I was trying to protect people.

Me: From what? Evil spirits? Negative entities?

Meher: There are entities out there, but, with how things are expressed, there really is no positive or negative. Those are just the labels we put on things, but if you don’t set good boundaries, then a spirit can come in who might think, “Well, the door is wide open. I’ll just come in and make myself at home.”

Me: So, there we go. Boundaries again.

Meher: Right. If you’re completely fine with that, and your guides know on a soul level that that’s what you’re open to, then these things can be allowed to happen. Once you realize that you don’t need the experience anymore, then you’ve gotten that lesson in boundaries, and you can move on from it. Sometimes it’s not easy to pick up and move on. Sometimes you can get very broken down in the process. Many of the people in my culture needed those lessons. They needed a strong hand.

Me: You always insisted that your devotees completely surrender to you. He goes on, “On one hand, you’re Meher Baba, the Compassionate Father, but to your immediate circle you were always a harsh disciplinarian. Is it really so that, for those who surrender to you you’d make them go through a difficult life to help rid them of their karma to finish their lessons fast?” So I guess he treats his immediate circle harshly but wasn’t this way with everyone else.

Meher: Again, if you’re going to be on the pinnacle of the mountain without any help, if you were to be that disciple that other disciples follow, you need to be strong. You need to have a thick skin. You need to know what you’re boundaries are. So, if I tell you to surrender to me and you do that without question and allow me to treat you in a way that you’d never allow another person to do, there’s a lesson in there. I never said this in life, but the lesson I was teaching them is that that’s not okay. You need to say something and stand up to me. If any of my disciples had done that to me, I would have come back with more force, but, again, that’s another lesson in boundaries.

Me: Did you do this in a calculated way?

Meher: It was not calculated. I was a very passionate person, and there were times when I allowed the passion in my heart—and we all have an ego. I definitely did, and it’s impossible not to when living in the physical world. —But sometimes that passion fed my ego. So, the ego allowed me to do things that could cause harm. The ego always does that. On a soul level, that was never the intention. The intention was rooted in teaching discipline or boundaries.

Me: Exactly. So, really, unlike Jesus—

Meher: It had to be automatic in that way. It had to be expressed in that way.

Me: Right. Now, from what I understand, Jesus didn’t come in with complete spiritual amnesia, but it sounds like you did. Is that true?

Meher: Yes, until I got to a certain age. There were some experiences that happened when I was young that helped me to remember. It was in my late teens, early twenties. That was when I started encountering different spiritual teachers, and that shaped my future.

Me: So, are you saying that reconnected you to the spiritual and rid you of some of your amnesia? Did those experiences help you remember who and what you are?

Meher: Spiritual ones in connection with emotions, and seeing the individual as something to be cherished.

Me: So, those were lessons in emotional honesty.

Meher: Yes, and that everything has to do with boundaries, and if someone treats you in a way that makes you feel “less than,” you need to set boundaries. I apologize to those for which I created more challenges, but I was only trying to help them.

Me: Yeah. That’s necessary sometimes as a teacher.

Meher: I also wanted the members of my flock to understand that I really know this on an emotional level. Every time we cross over, we go through a life review. That’s been said time and time again. This helps you connect to the fact that anything you say to someone else, you have to be aware of how it’s projected, because you’re in part responsible for the feelings they feel even if it wasn’t your intention.

Robert: He’s showing me a ship.

Meher: You can direct that ship in a certain way, and, in your interaction with people, you can choose words that carry a certain energy that might make the person respond in a different way, feel an emotion in a different way. One word might come across and make that person feel belittlement, but maybe that wasn’t your intention.

Me: Exactly. So, it’s what you project, not what you intend. Those two can be very different. Just a couple more questions. “In regards to your beloved wife, what was your reason for being celibate?” I didn’t know you were celibate.

Robert: I didn’t either.

Meher: It all goes back to discipline again. There’s a fine line between discipline and control. Control comes from repression. Discipline can easily cross over into repression, so for me, celibacy was an act of repression. It crossed that line. In fact, it crossed over in other ways in my interaction with people.

Me: So, in celibacy, who’s being repressed?

Meher: Me! Not just me, though, but my wife as well. I was repressing my sexual desires. The human desire for sex comes from the need to procreate, but it also is a reminder of our connection to each other and the joy that connection can bring.

Me: Well do you regret being so harsh or projecting harshness?

Meher: I regret nothing.

Me: Well, everything is a lesson, I guess, even that.

Meher: Yes.

Me: Okay. I have two last questions. The last one will be yours, Erik, so be thinking of something.

Erik: Okay.

Me: What is your overall message to humanity?

(Long pause)

Robert (chuckling): Wow. Okay. This seems like he’s undermining his own self!

Meher: He who speaks loudest isn’t always worthy of following.

Robert (to Meher): Are you saying that maybe people shouldn’t follow you?

Meher: That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m just saying that you need to consider that just because someone speaks the loudest and seems to put forth a certain image, they shouldn’t necessarily lead you. Erik and I have been talking a lot about the connection of the heart to the mind, so when you’re in the presence of someone, you need to make sure you don’t get completely enraptured by the feelings you get, because sometimes that can become a lure that the predator uses to pull the prey in. I’m not saying do not enjoy that in the moment, but if you become more familiar with that individual and you start to feel “less than,” you need to allow that feeling to funnel up to the brain, and you need to start questioning why that is happening. Ask, “Do I deserve this?” And do not make excuses for that other person or yourself.

Me: So, what you’re saying is he who speaks the loudest, you’re not talking about a leader who rants and raves and projects harshness or has a temper. You’re talking about—

Meher: I’m talking about charisma.

Me: Charisma. Okay.

Meher: A person who has charisma can be whispering and still be the loudest one in the room.

Robert: Wow, that’s very good.

Me: Okay, Erik. What about you? What do you have to say to him or ask him?

Robert: What was your question for Erik?

Me: No, I want him to ask Meher Baba a question.

Erik (to Robert): Dude, I already know what the questions is.

Robert (to Erik): But I don’t know! I’m a part of this conversation, too!

Robert laughs.

Erik: Look, I think Baba’s a cool dude, and I can relate to him, because sometimes his actions are misunderstood or misinterpreted, but he’s been gone for over 40 years, and people are still talking about him. In time, a lot of the judgments that we placed on his actions will fade, and we’ll start to see the bigger picture of what he taught people.

Me: Like the true essence with the ego stripped away?

Erik: Yeah. The ego always fucks everything up. I don’t want to put words in Jesus’s mouth (apparently Jesus just appeared and is hanging in the wings, listening.) but every person, regardless of whether they have an awareness of spirit or not, has an ego that can come into play and muddy the water a little bit.

Me: Yeah, and you were often misunderstood, Erik.

Erik: Oh, yes.

Me: Okay, well, thank you Meher Baba.

Meher: My pleasure.

By the way, Jamie is going to have a big online event with Erik. For a whole hour, he’ll answer questions from the participants. It’ll only cost $20, so I hope you all will attend! It’ll be on March 26th starting at 5:00 PM CDT. I’ll know more later and will keep you posted. Until then, to judge interest, please answer this poll.

If you enjoyed this interview, you might also enjoy this interview, by the same group, of Elvis Presley.


Update 7-29-14:

Since this post, I have found increasing numbers of channeling sites that include Meher Baba.

Here is one:

http://www.whitelightseeker.com/Blog.html?entry=channeling-mother-teresa-and-meher