The Secret Story Behind the Intelligence Notebooks

Six months after Baba's death in 1969 two composition books appearing to date back to 1925 or 1926 were found at the bottom of a box in a shed at Meherabad. The notebooks were plain school composition books, the speckled kind. They were penned in in a very neat hand, on both sides of the paper, what appeared to be something by Meher Baba.

Here is my explanation of what I think the notebooks represent. At the bottom of this article, first written by me in 2012, is a new article summarizing my thoughts on this topic as they stand today.

Prior to the invention of the printing press in Germany in the 15th century, written books were constantly copied by scribes. It took a long time to scribe a book well by hand. The paper or parchment upon which books were copied was so unstable that copying of important works had to be constantly kept up. Otherwise the latest copy would evaporate before it was replaced. This is how ancient books came down to us through the ages. Had works such as the writings of Plato and Aristotle, the Bible and the Koran, not been copied and recopied in this way by hand for centuries, they would have simply disappeared.

But even with the invention of the printing press there was not immediately any easy way to make a safe backup copy as one waited for the work to be printed. So when an author was done with his original handwritten manuscript and was preparing to ship it off to an urban center to be printed, he very often had to make his own copy in case anything happened to the original along the way. For indeed there were bandits on the roads in those days, ships sank, wars would break out without warning, and so the authors wanted to protect their works so they would not rewrite their books from scratch. Thus a tradition was created that a copy be made before the original was sent out, and if the author could afford it he would hire someone to do it. And this was called a "fair copy." A person with good handwriting skills (an actual scribe was generally too expensive) was hired or recruited to make a hand-written duplicate (the fair copy) as a back-up protection prior to the original being sent out for further professional duplication. This was merely a safeguard that any practical writer would take. It was traditional. It was called a fair copy.

This tradition of producing a fair copy was continued well into the early 20th century. For although the "carbon copy" had largely replaced it, many people until very recently still wrote books by hand. Below is a fair copy of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, begun around 1922. See notes and corrections by the author on the left hand column.

Fair copy with additions, Finnegan's Wake, 1922

Compare the above snippet of a fair copy to the one below, taken from the Intelligence notebooks found in Meherazad in 1969. Note similarly what appear to be the author's requested corrections and additions on the margin.

From the notebooks, with similar author's additions in left hand side

Comparing the fair copy to text in Baba's handwriting
It is known that the hand-writer who wrote down the Intelligence Notebooks was working from material handwritten by Baba. To see that the person was copying original text from Baba's own handwriting, compare the text in the samples below. First is from the discovered manuscript (the fair copy), text taken from second notebook p. 11. Just below it is a scan from page 23 of the 39 pages of Baba's own handwriting that were discovered afterward and are also believed to have been written in 1925 or 1926 (published in 2000 as In God's Hand by Sheriar Press).

Note the first is the same basic text, copied and translated neatly, as the second. Some may wonder why there might be minor changes. Baba may have made some changes that he requested of the copier. Or the copier was asked to fix any errors as was customary of Baba to ask his mandali to do. It is incorrect to think Baba never changed his mind. Baba often changed his mind about words and even made mistakes when he wrote. See example below from p. 6 Baba's own handwriting from the same discovered material.

The comparisons between the Infinite Intelligence notebooks and Baba's own writing on the same subject are nearly endless. One is the squiggles that seem to be a polite and careful way to emulate an original that was in Baba's hand.

A squiggle from the copy of the notebooks

Check out this comparison. Above is from the notebooks, below in a portion copied into the notebooks as it was found in Baba's own handwriting.

  A squiggle from Baba's own handwritten notes.

Bhau with Baba 1960s

The Other Ten Percent
According to Baba's night watchman Bhau Kalchuri, in January 1969 Baba began dictating to him material that he wanted him to include in a book called The Nothing and the Everything. Baba told Bhau that God Speaks contained 90% of the missing book, but that Baba was giving Bhau the other 10%. Bhua has said that when he began to do some editing on the discovered manuscripts in the 1980s, he recognized instantly some of the points that Baba had been giving to him in 1969, leading Bhau to believe that the manuscript was in fact the missing book.

What I think the notebooks are
So this is what the notebooks found in the trunk at Meherazad, India in 1969 appear to me to be. They appear to be a fair copy of Baba's book that Baba had one of his mandali or a teacher at one of his resident schools quietly prepare for him at Meherabad in 1926 without telling anyone else about it. Baba had his own special plans for the original and knew it would be gone for a long time.

The table room where Baba wrote in 1925, 26

Here then is my guess as to the events that led up to the discovery of the notebooks in 1969. Baba wrote his missing book by hand (said to have been 250 pages) beginning in October 1925, using a pencil and loose leaf notebook paper in a table room (see image right) that he had constructed for this purpose. When he was done with his book, or at some point afterward, Baba had someone, probably not a mandali, prepare a fair copy of the book and then had it placed in a trunk. Who he asked to produce this copy is not known, but the person did an extremely neat job. Baba then used the original as a kind of prop or decoy, carrying it about, allowing small peaks, making it a spectacle. Baba had keys passed about and so forth to produce an elaborate trail to interest those that need such things. All this was done without anyone knowing about Baba's fair copy that he never discussed with anyone. He deliberately omitted his name or any mention of dates from the copy. He wanted it to appear lost, perhaps to be revealed later for his own reasons. This fair copy Baba had made was discovered in the trunk, by that time in a storage room at Meherabad, in 1969. No one had any idea what it was, but only guesses, as no one was allowed in on Baba's ploy. No date and or author name is present. Even the identity of the copyist is not stated anywhere on the manuscript. These are now called the Intelligence Notebooks, and an extensively edited version of them was published in 2005 as Infinite Intelligence, on top of a very simple and straightforward version by me in 2010.

It is my conclusion, then, that the Intelligence Notebooks, two neatly scribed composition books totaling 255 pages found in a storage room in Meherabad immediately after Baba's death, are none other than a faithful fair copy of Baba's missing book.

There are several reasons to think this. Baba began his spiritual mission in 1922 in Bombay in his Manzil-e-Meem ashram, only later moving to Meherabad where he set up permanent camp in late 1923. On July 10, 1925 Baba began his silence. In 1925 at Meherabad Baba began to privately write a book in "the table room" he had built especially for that purpose. Baba was not seen at any time during this period working on any other book of this size. Baba only wrote in the box for a few hours each evening from 1925-1926. After this he gave up writing entirely.

Anyone who who has examined the handwritten notebooks carefully has concurred that they have to have been by Meher Baba. The odd style of using parentheses in the middle of sentences, the constant switching between Gujarati, Urdu, and English in mid-paragraph, and the use of squiggles and odd designs on pages (expressed neatly and obediently in the fair copy) are all peculiar to Meher Baba's flamboyant personal style of writing. Also, the emphasis of the sanskara, an idea barely understood prior to Meher Baba (even within schools of Advaita Vedanta) is prevalent. There is no evidence that anyone, in the East or West, knew of any of this prior to Meher Baba's elucidations later in God Speaks. In other words, no one else could have written it.

Also, there is a lengthy passage in the fair copy that was found in duplicate in Baba's own handwriting, also after Baba's death, as if some portion of the material used was misplaced from the original document that was being copied in 1926. This other material was published as "In God's Hand" and is known to be in Baba's handwriting. So at least one portion of the fair copy has been proven to be directly from Baba's handwriting. The style does not change in the book before or after this material.

It is known from the notebook style and other clues that the books had to have been written in the late 1920s. Thus the only alternative to the notebooks being the missing book is that, in the same short period of time, while Baba was administrating his Prem Ashram school, writing "the book" in his box built especially for the purpose, Baba was simultaneously writing a second book of the same length. Thus Baba wrote in 1925 and 1926 not one but two 250 page handwritten books, one in the box made for the occasion, and another when no one was looking and in clear sight - and had the second one copied without anyone knowing it. This notion is absolutely absurd to me, simply too complicated to imagine. Remember Ocham's law. Therefore I believe the Intelligence notebooks are in fact the missing book.

Why did Baba not make all this more clear? Why did he not have his name put on the notebooks or sign them or have them dated or make any mention of them? Why did he not even have the copier add a title to the notebooks?

To me, at least, the answer is quite clear. Baba allowed, at least for the time being, and perhaps eternally, for there to be plausible deniability over the authorship of the book. Why? Because mystery is part of mysticism, part of the language of the mystic. And the Intelligence Book is written exclusively for the mystic. The orthodox mentality can only accept what is approved of by others, what is for sure and accepted. What the orthodox mind accepts as proven is merely that which is accepted by his group of peers, his establishment. He denies God within himself, within his heart. But the missing book is a book that can only be corroborated as being from Baba by the heart. This is the book of the heart. It can never be proven by any external means. Or it would be a book of orthodoxy. And that book Baba wrote also, 30 years after his missing book. And that is God Speaks. And most cannot even read it. And that's why in a sense all this is moot, except for the most die-hard mystical imagination.

Summarizing my arguments
It makes very little sense to me that in the same period of 1925 to 1926 Meher Baba would write not one, but two, 250 page handwritten books, both of which he kept under wraps and never released, and both of which were lost afterward for the remainder of his life. Even if this far-fetched scenario were true, it follows that the Intelligence Notebooks were a
book written by Baba at the same time as another, the same length, and that it too was lost. It would be an indisputable fact then that this second lost book is just a little bit more enigmatic and mysterious than the celebrated lost book, for it is the only one he managed to write without anyone knowing about, or at least talking about. Thus in either case this book presented here is Meher Baba's mysterious lost book. If nothing else it is the better kept secret sibling of the first, so in a sense more lost than the lost book. So the whole argument over whether it is Baba's missing book is moot. It simply is, by definition of terms, the secret lost book of Meher Baba.

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My more recent thoughts on this subject.

The really, really dumb guy interpretation of what the intelligent notebooks are is as follows. The notion is promoted that Chanji took dictation from a slate board during lectures at the boy's school. He then 'worked up' his notes as the intelligence notebooks.

This is impossible on several grounds, which I'll list.

The notebooks are not in Chanji's handwriting, and there is no reason that an expensive and time consuming fair copy would be made of Chanji's notes. That is a luxury that would not have been afforded them in 1925, 26.

What would pieces identified as being by Baba be doing in Chanji's notes?

Why would a fair copyist have changed Baba's own words without Baba's permission?

The writing style has parentheses within parentheses within parenthases. This is how a person thinks, but is not how a person 'works up' what another person has said.

The sentences are very long, often a paragraph long, and not in Chanji's style of writing which was simplistic. The slate Baba used was small, with chalk, and would only have been a few words before Baba erased it. Such sentences would be impractical to give on a slate.

If these are lectures, why are they so dense you have to read them very slow and over and over to understand? There is no indication Baba would give lectures beyond human capacity to understand, and that Chanji understood it so well that he worked it up into this complex form? That makes zero sense.

If this is Chanji's work, why did Chanji change to Hindi suddenly?

Also there are places where the language changes mid-sentence, a famous feature of Baba's dictation. Why would Chanji be writing this way?

If a person does not see that this is a book, with a theme and beginning, middle, and end, then they have no understood the book. This is not a set of disconnected lectures. It is a continuous thread of thought, starting same place Baba begins in God Speaks and ending same place. Starting with all parts of the whole and whole in the parts, ending with the need for the perfect master.

This is precisely what we ought to have expected from Baba's hidden book.

I think it is fitting and good that most not believe what I'm saying. For this makes it a book for the elect, a truly esoteric book. Those who are not ready for it will continue to wait, and their minds be protected.