5929   LOVER & THE BELOVED

On Sunday, August 26th, 1962, Meher Baba held a special meeting at Meherazad for the Poona workers. The meeting lasted for three hours, and important points regarding arrangements for the East-West Gathering were finalized. An estimate of costs for the arrangements was worked out and submitted to Baba for his approval. It was estimated that at least seven thousand rupees would have to be spent for arrangements inside Guruprasad (the pandal and rented chairs, microphone and electrical fixtures, lavatories, water supply and daily labor charges). Baba selected nine close lovers to share the burden of these expenses: Joseph Harb to pay one thousand five hundred rupees; Nariman Dadachanji, Hoshang Bharucha and Kishanchand Gajwani to pay one thousand rupees each; and Sohrabji Siganporia, Meherjee, Bapusaheb Shinde, Minoo Desai and Minoo Bharucha, five hundred rupees each.

On August 31st, Baba dictated two more discourses, one on The Lover and the Beloved and the other on Forgiveness.

The Lover and The Beloved

God is love. And Love must love. And to love there must be a Beloved. But since God is Existence infinite and eternal there is no one for Him to love but Himself. And in order to love Himself, He must imagine Himself as the Beloved whom He as the lover imagines He loves.

Beloved and lover implies separation. And separation creates longing; and longing causes search. And the wider and the more intense the search, the greater the separation and the more terrible the longing.

When longing is at its most intense point, separation is complete, and the purpose of separation, which was that love might experience itself as lover and Beloved, is fulfilled; and union follows. And when union is attained, the lover knows that he himself was all along the Beloved, whom he loved and desired union with; and that all the impossible situations that he overcame were obstacles which he himself had placed in the path to himself.

To attain union is so impossibly difficult because it is impossible to become what you already are! Union is nothing other than knowledge of oneself as the Only One.

The following is Baba's message entitled Forgive and Forget: