THE GOD-MAN The Life, Journeys and Work of Meher Baba with an ...

THE MAN 395bear in mind that we do not always have his own words, for he neither writes nor speaks, and sometimes thewords are those of others representing what he is thought to have said. What I understand Baba to mean isthat the first individual soul who completed the processes of natural evolution and spiritual involution, andbecame fully God-realized, a Man-God dropped his 'physical, subtle, and mental vehicles' to enter the stateof infinite power, knowledge and bliss; in due course, and, in the love and compassion of God, he reincarnateddirectly as God-Man, for the sake of awakening mankind from captivity to the phenomenal world.He was the first 'Saviour'. Who he was and when he appeared is unknown, for his advent is beyond history,though without him there would be no history.Meher Baba says further that 'The Avatar is always one and the same ... made to repeat his manifestationsfrom time to time, in different cycles, adopting different names and different human forms .... ' (Ibid, p.144)As Krishna says in the Bhagavad-gita:Whenever there is a decline of righteousness and rise of unrighteousness, 0 Arjuna, then I incarnatemyself.Or to quote what was said by the second century St Theophilus of Antioch:.... whenever the Father of all wants to do so, he sends him (The Word) into some place where he ispresent and is heard and seen.There are other rather like references in the Egyptian Philo and Clement of Alexandria, though this line ofenquiry need not be followed here, except that Origen's vision of the Logos manifesting himself can bequoted:There exist diverse forms of the Logos under which he reveals himself to his disciples, conforminghimself to the degree of light of each one according to the degree of progress in saintliness.What is important is that the advent of the God-Man is repeated in history.I do not understand this to mean that historically there is only one God-Man under different names, thatthe first God-Man of whom we know, perhaps Zoroaster, manifested again as Krishna, later as Jesus Christ.That would be to confuse what is eternal with the temporal.