Introduction to God Speaks, by Darvish Khan

I've read many short encapsulations of Baba's main book God Speaks intended for new readers. I think of all I've read, the one I post here is among the very best. It is by Bill Gannett of Northern California, who writes under the pen name Darvish Khan, an alter ego Gannett describes as a hack ghazal poet! Gannett has also studied Farsi and does his own Hafez translations. Much of his poetry and prose on his blog Darvish Writes is refreshingly classy, the humor often biting, and sometimes outright shocking, but whatever he writes it is always witty and worth reading. Here then is Darvish Khan's clear and succinct introduction to God Speaks, a hard book to put into words.

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Darvish Khan

Introduction to God Speaks by Meher Baba

God Speaks was first published in 1955 but in the almost 60 subsequent years has not become a part of public discourse and debate. It is a virtually unknown work; yet it is the single most important cosmological and metaphysical treatise of our time.

It is a work that uniquely combines and develops the points of view of Vedanta and Samkya of the Indian philosophical tradition and which at the same time contextualizes the modern theory of evolution. It does so from a narrative point of view based on the term sanskara, i.e. “impression”, which is the constituent basis of karma (the experience of identity through time).

Vedanta maintains the utter primacy and supremacy of Reality: atma (soul) and Paramatma (Oversoul) are one and the same, like a drop of ocean relative to the ocean itself. Samkya, in detailing the relationship of Purusha- consciousness, to Prakriti- sanskaras, accounts for the conundrum of our “drop-soul” existence.

The brilliant theme of God Speaks is to account for Creation as God’s whim to know himself successively as stone, vegetable, worm, fish, bird and animal in order to attain complete consciousness in the human form so that, through the process of reincarnation, the involution (sublimation) of consciousness can result in the realization “I am God”.

Creation is a process in which atma strives to realize its identity as Paramatma and thereby gives rise to the evolution of form through sanskaras working through the agency of the three bodies: the gross, subtle and mental bodies. These bodies in turn give rise to the three worlds: the gross, subtle and mental worlds.

The gross body refers to the physical form, the subtle body to the energy that animates the physical form, and the mental body to where all impressions, gross, subtle or mental are stored in seed form. Only the spiritually advanced are conscious of the higher bodies. Death is the disassociation of the subtle and mental bodies from the gross body and birth is the adoption of the subtle and mental bodies of a new gross body. Each life is the expression of formerly acquired sanskaras and, in the act of expressing these sanskaras, the simultaneous creation of new sanskaras that require expression in the subsequent life. What you pack into the suitcase of this life is what you live out of the next life, ad infinitum.

All of creation is one of several states of God based on sanskaras. In short, it is sanskaras which give rise to 1) consciousness, 2) bodies- the vehicles for the accumulation, development and expression of those sanskaras, and 3) the worlds- the environment in which unconscious God progressively realizes himself as God through the agency of the bodies.

Creation is a process that evolves form and consciousness so as to involve greater and greater consciousness through repeated reincarnation- all of this over unimaginably long periods of time, until the drop-soul consciously identifies itself as the Ocean of infinite Knowledge, Power and Bliss!

The text presented in God Speaks is simple and elegant but elaborately stated through crafted redundancy. The book presents charts and diagrams that cogently cross reference metaphysical terms from different traditions and which represent pictorially the theme of this masterful work.

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© 2014, Bill Gannett, Reproduced by permission of the author.
Darvish Khan Writes               Gurdjieff