Dear Meher Center Family and Friends,
We would like to remind all of you about the opportunity to attend a Virtual Afternoon Sahavas hosted by the Center on October 6th from 3 to 6 p.m. We will be sending out the registration details and a detailed schedule of events in the coming week.
We would also like to share that reservations are now open for the Young Adult Sahavas which will be held on Center from November 8th to the 11th. This is an annual gathering of young adults between ages 19 and 40. Families with children are most welcome to attend as well. If you would like to make a reservation, please call the Gateway office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., seven days a week. We look forward to seeing all who come.
This is the 70th anniversary of a gathering that has come to be known as the "three incredible weeks" held in 1954 at Meherabad, India. Below are excerpts from a talk Baba gave at that time called "The Final Declaration."
"I have come not to establish anything new — I have come to put life into the old. I have not come to establish retreats or ashrams. I create them for the purpose of My universal work, only to repeatedly dissolve them once that purpose has been served.
"The universe is My ashram, and every heart is My house; but I manifest only in those hearts in which all, other than Me, ceases to live.
"When My Universal Religion of Love is on the verge of fading into insignificance, I come to breathe life into it and to do away with the farce of dogmas that defile it in the name of religions and stifle it with ceremonies and rituals.
"The present universal confusion and unrest has filled the heart of man with greater lust for power and a greed for wealth and face, bringing in its wake untold misery, hatred, jealousy, frustration and fear. Suffering in the world is at its height, in spite of all the striving to spread peace and prosperity, to bring about a lasting happiness.
"For man to have a glimpse of lasting happiness he has first to realize that God, being in all, knows all; that God alone acts and reacts through all; that God, in the guise of countless animate and inanimate entities, experiences the innumerably varied phenomena of suffering and happiness, and that God Himself undergoes all these illusory happenings. Thus, it is God Who has brought suffering in human experience to its height, and God alone Who will efface this illusory suffering and bring the illusory happiness to its height.
"To affirm religious faiths, to establish societies, or to hold conferences will never bring about the feeling of unity and oneness in the life of mankind, now completely absorbed in the manyness of illusion. Unity in the midst of diversity can be made to be felt only by touching the very core of the heart. That is the work for which I have come.
"I have come to sow the seed of love in your hearts so that, in spite of all superficial diversity which your life in·illusion must experience and endure, the feeling of oneness, through love, is brought about amongst all the nations, creeds, sects and castes of the world.
"In order to bring this about, I am preparing to break My Silence. When I break My Silence it will not be to fill your ears with spiritual lectures. I shall speak only One Word, and this Word will penetrate the hearts of all men and make even the sinner feel that he is meant to be a saint, while the saint will know that God is in the sinner as much as He is in himself.
"When I speak that Word, I shall lay the foundation for that which is to take place during the next seven hundred years. When I come again after seven hundred years, the evolution of consciousness will have reached such an apex that materialistic tendencies will be automatically transmuted into spiritual longing, and the feeling of equality in universal brotherhood will prevail. This means that opulence and poverty, literacy and illiteracy, jealousy and hatred, which are in evidence today in their full measure, will then be dissolved through the feeling of the oneness of all men. Prosperity and happiness will then be at their zenith."*
In His love and service,
Buz Connor
For Meher Center board and staff
*Three Incredible Weeks with Meher Baba, by Malcolm Schloss and Charles Purdom, pp.115-117.
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