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THE NEW LIFE ADVENTURE

Craig San Roque

 
I cannot help asking who I am to introduce this New Life. I did not see you, touch, live with you, though I have observed a few of your New Life companions as they are at the end of a lifetime of relationship with you. I can see what real love does to a soul and I like what I see.

I also know that a real live internal relationship is possible with you even though your body does lie in the Tomb on Meherabad Hill.

I am not sure what you did for us during that unique phase of your work which you called the New Life. I doubt if any of us knows (yet). This is, after all, only the beginning of the new avataric voyage and we are all in the same boat, each to his own but each in you.

I believe, however, that during your universal work you set into crosscurrents of my particular lifestream the necessary cues, clues and opportunities by which I will uncover that profound, unlimited treasure which is my inheritance.

In the course of this life I have now come upon a most intriguing pattern, a pattern which you yourself have carefully woven into the fabric of the universe.

(A universe, by the way, with which we are all one and which breathes within each of its inhabitants. You said that your work as Avatar had been completed one hundred per cent to your satisfaction. This implies that the fires which you woke must now be smoldering within the heart of every individual mental universe. If the core of the universe is burning we have only to let it manifest from within. I am sure you have left ways to unlock and to contain that internal universal burning.)

In the course of this life I have come upon you and your work in the form of the New Life, but you must have arranged that meeting; you don't leave opportunities scattered carelessly on the path. Now that I have been brought face to face with this intriguing pattern of living I sense that I have a responsibility to take it very seriously. I believe that I have both the responsibility and the right to 'penetrate into the essence of the being and the significance' of your New Life.

I find myself knocking at your door, begging an invitation, but who am I to introduce myself into your New Life? Well . . . . . ?

First, I am curious, and it might just be fun.

Second, I am reasonably aware that as a human being I have a responsibility towards the ongoing voyage of my own soul.

Third, I have an increasing suspicion that alone I am not capable of navigating this ship.

Fourth, there is a definite longing in here to hand over command to one who can master the soul.

Fifth, there is a mounting acceptance that you are, after all, the real and only master of the ocean.

Sixth, I have a nagging sense that I had better do something very real towards that handover, right now.

Seventh, the whole ship, voyage and ocean is in your palm anyway, so what do I lose by giving everything over to you?

Now these feelings draw me toward the New Life adventure and I suspect that therein will be found a new avataric way to the beloved ancient truth and the real love life.

There is something about the New Life which exerts a compelling and integrating fascination. I feel it as some kind of setting-off point for a grown-up mystical God-loving life.

Still and all, when faced with the bewildering behaviour of you and your companions through 1949 and '50 I cannot help asking, 'Were you really doing anything for me?'

Even though the momentum of my this-life has brought me upon the rocky challenge of your New Life, who am I to presume to take up such a challenge?

Who am I?

As yet I hardly know, though sometimes, when sane, I do suspect that one day I will accept myself Whole Heartedly as God.

Meanwhile my heart is still in fragments and full of strangers, but I do often try and count myself among the many would-be lovers of you.

I know that part of my heart wants to be a lover of you. The other straggling fragments are beginning to feel that something about you and the New Life just might act as a focus about which to pivot a scattered internal universe. Having gathered myself, might there not emerge opportunity enough to really hand over this collected heart to the lover within?

I suspect that it was to help that wavering, wandering lover, within each of us, that you drew so consistently from your companions that particular note of love which sounds throughout the tales of the New Life.

You introduced the pattern of the New Life into the way of the pilgrim; was it to call out, from within, that resilient one-pointed lover of God that we so tentatively contain?

You have resolutely set before us a love task that demands nothing less than one hundred per cent commitment to human life at its best. You have prepared for us something very adult to chew upon.

Craig San Roque
London
June, 1975

 

TALES FROM THE NEW LIFE, narrated by Eruch, Mehera, Mani and Meheru, pp. vi-viii
1976 © Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust

               

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