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

426 THE GOD-MANThus we are brought to religion and its practice. Baba tells everyone that he should observe his ownreligion, but he also says that he has come to do away with ceremonies and rituals, by which be means to putan end to mere conformity. 'The soul may spend many lives in gathering the lessons of external formality', hesays, 'but the time comes when it longs for the realities of the inner life'. Unless one is constantly and fullyaware of the reality within the practice, ritual is a binding.This applies to sacraments, which are acts in phenomena, which convey inner meaning or grace. Thus inthe Christian sacrifice of the Mass the priest who performs and the believers who participate share in an actthat symbolizes the death and resurrection of Christ and the rising from death to the life of the soul, whichhas meaning only as the priest intends the act and for the believer as he intends to participate in the sacrifice,making it his own: otherwise there is nothing. The same is true of any other religious practice also ofadherence to dogmas and creeds, for, unless the reality is perceived and entered into, allegiance to what isdone or believed may be fanatical and destructive: this binding to external form has brought much evil.Although Baba is constantly declaring that he does away with rites and ceremonies, he allows arti to beperformed before him. He also allows his portrait to be garlanded and statues to be made and garlanded.Why does he permit this? Why does he tolerate his devotees capitalizing the initials of personal pronounswhen referring to him, and allow the title of Avatar (it is not a title) to be attached sometimes to his name? Ithink the answer is that he recognizes the effort to express love. He so longs for the love of the entire heartthat even the tiny spark contained in these signs of devotion is not to be denied. I once said to him, 'Baba,smash the idols', and he no more than smiled. Yet his warnings against idolatry are very severe. Idols,however, are not merely in these simple things, which could so easily be smashed, they are as much inopinions, prejudices and beliefs of all kinds not rigorously subjected to scrutiny, especially in the worship ofpower. 1The obedience of which Baba speaks depends upon intelligent conviction, for, without intelligence,conviction is equivalent to the idolatry I have just mentioned, the greatest danger in all devotion.1 That is to say, power in the sense of 'possession of force that can be employed to one's own advantageagainst others'; not in the sense of 'ability to do'.