Shelving Sanskaras

It must have been sometime in the late seventies or early eighties. I was at Meherazad sitting outside the Mandali Hall with Eruch and other fellow pilgrims when Eruch asked, “what attracts you all to keep coming back to Meherazad?” All our answers amounted to the same thing: that this was our spiritual home, the place where we felt Baba’s presence most palpably, and we all loved being with the mandali and hearing stories of Baba. Eruch agreed with all of this but added that it was also because Baba temporarily shelved our sanskaras while we were here which allowed us to feel His presence more strongly. Proof of this for me was in the fact that whenever I returned to Australia from Meherazad there was always a period of re-acclimating when it felt like the full weight of my sanskaras had returned.

When I first heard of Baba, I was a teenager who had just finished high school. I had spent most of my schooling since I was eight at a prestigious Catholic boarding school for boys, and while not at boarding school I lived a lot of my time on farms that were isolated. I was adopted at birth (which I was not told until much later in life) and to add to all this I was deeply introverted. My adopted parents were of their generation, hard-working and conservative. I stood out as the odd one in the family. I think they must have thought they had adopted some kind of Martian kid; at times I felt I had landed in alien territory.

I remember when I first told my father about my acceptance of Meher Baba, he replied, “what’s wrong with our Aussie gods?” In the end though, both my parents came to respect Baba not as a spiritual authority of any kind, but because they saw how my following Him had changed me for the better.

From what I’ve gathered, when you come into Beloved Baba’s orbit and surrender fully to Him you are no longer subject to the kind of rigid sanskaric determinism that is presented in the God Speaks definition of sanskaras as “… impressions which are left on the soul as memories from former lives, and which determine one’s desires in the present lifetime.” Rather, Baba enters into the very fabric of your life and rearranges things for your spiritual benefit.

In His Universal Message, Baba makes this clear: (The breaking of His silence in this message I take to mean the same as Baba speaking in our hearts) “I am the Divine Beloved who loves you more than you can ever love yourself. The breaking of my Silence will help you to help yourself in knowing your real Self.”

There’s an obvious partnership here. Baba’s intention is to help you to help yourself to know your real Self. And while Baba may have shelved some of my sanskaras while at Meherazad, back in Australia, He seemed to organise my life in such a way that I had to learn how not to be so dominated by my sanskaras, particularly by my hardened introverted ones. I started my career studying to be a vet, but after hearing about Baba, somehow, I ended up as a primary school teacher. And nothing can get a person more quickly out of their head than having to teach young children!

Looking back, I don’t think Baba wanted me to become a raving extrovert; He was happy for me to be introverted but not as an escape from life. I think He wants us all, whatever is our nature, to arrive at what he calls “positive forgetfulness” of ourselves for this is where He can enter into our lives, no matter how diverse they may be. This is what I felt Baba had been guiding me towards from the outset without giving it a title. In positive forgetfulness our sanskaras are momentarily shelved, but we don’t need to be at Meherazad for this to happen.

Baba says: “The whole philosophy of happiness and unhappiness … hinges on the question of forgetfulness of some kind or another. Remembrance is an attachment of the mind to a particular idea, person, thing or place and forgetfulness is its opposite.” Baba then goes on to contrast positive forgetfulness with forms of negative forgetfulness, which He says can be achieved by escape into sleep or madness or “may be artificially induced in various degrees by the use of intoxicants or drugs.”

Baba even uses the word “cure” to describe the efficacy of positive forgetfulness. Everybody, one way or another, gets “wounded” by their upbringing, some more deeply than others, which then becomes locked in our memory; a perfectly happy childhood is a fantasy. But instead of plunging into deep psychological reflection on hurts, and apportioning blame, Baba seems to be saying to forget the past, but in a positive way, not via suppression. In this regard, Francis has a line in one of his songs which I have always loved: “Do not bother about the past – it went because it could not last and has no place in the new.”

Baba does not actually define positive forgetfulness other than to suggest it is an attitude of mind or a state of mental control leading to a real sense of freedom. He leaves it up to each person to find their own approach. But He does highlight the effects of its absence: “One who is not equipped with this positive forgetfulness becomes a barometer of his surroundings. His poise is disturbed by the slightest whisper of praise or flattery, and by the faintest suggestion of slander or criticism … [such a person] knows no peace.”

Although Baba says that positive forgetfulness is “by no means easy to acquire,” once achieved a person starts to become centred not in themselves but in Him as their real Self. But Baba points out, it takes lifetimes to make it a permanent feature of one’s life. Then He makes the extraordinary remark – and here I think of a Shakespeare, a Beethoven, a Coomaraswamy, or an Einstein: “Some people, as a result of efforts towards forgetfulness in past lives, get spontaneous and temporary flashes of it in later life, and it is such people who give to the world the best in poetry, art and philosophy, and who makes the greatest discoveries in science.” And while Baba has stressed that remembrance of Him is the way forward, positive forgetfulness is the flip side of that coin.

References
God Speaks, by Meher Baba, 1st ed, pp. 184-185.
Golden Book of Praise, by Francis Brabazon, p. 2.