REACHING LOS ANGELES at eight-thirty on Sunday morning, May 29th (1932), Baba went to stay at the home of Priscilla and Marc Edmund Jones, at 2400 North Gower Street in Hollywood. Mr. Jones was an astrologer by profession and a friend of Malcolm Schloss. Chanji, Quentin and Meredith stayed with Baba at the Jones home. Kaka, Adi Jr. and Beheram stayed at a nearby house. Jean, Malcolm, Margaret Starr and the others invited by Baba stayed at the Mission Hotel.
Baba remained in Hollywood for seven hectic days, each packed full of interviews and receptions. Norina Matchabelli and Elizabeth Patterson had driven all the way from New York to help in arranging Baba’s schedule.
The newspapers had anticipated his arrival, and at a press conference held at 1 P.M. on the day he arrived, Meher Baba gave the following message:
So much has been said and written about the Highest Consciousness and God-Realization that people are bewildered as to the right process and immediate possibility of attainment. The philosophical mind, wading laboriously through such literature, only ends up learning a few intellectual gymnastics. The highest state of consciousness is latent in all. The Son of God is in every man but requires to be manifested.
The method of attaining this great consciousness must be very practical and adapted to the existing mental and material conditions of the world. The rituals and ceremonies instituted by the priest-ridden churches have made the process of attainment too dry; and that accounts for the lack of interest felt all over the world toward religious things in general. India, in spite of its high state of spirituality, at the present moment is very caste-ridden because of the enforcement by various cults of a plethora of rituals and ceremonies, which maintain the form but kill the spirit. Forms and ceremonies, instead of diminishing the ego, strengthen it. The stronger the ego, the more aggressive it becomes. In the anxiety to become conscious of a separate self through thinking thoughts such as “I am in the right” or “I am the favored one” or “I only have the right to live,” one becomes destructive.
The furious race for armaments by the Christian world, evincing an utter disregard for the commandment of Jesus that if one cheek is smitten, the other should be offered, shows clearly what I mean by the ego. In the evolutionary ascent from the mineral, vegetable and animal life, the latent mind gradually expands and develops until full consciousness is reached in the human form. To create this very consciousness, the universe emanated from the Infinite Ocean of knowledge and bliss – namely, God the Absolute.
However, in the human form with the mind fully developed, a difficulty is confronted which prophets and spiritual masters have periodically visited this earthly plane to remove. Besides the development of full consciousness in the human form as a result of previous conditions of life, the ego, the “I,” has evolved.
The ego is composed of fulfilled and unfulfilled desires and creates the illusion of feeling finite, weak and unhappy. Henceforth, the soul can only progress through the general suppression of this finite ego and its transformation into the Divine Ego – the One Infinite Self – by retaining in full the consciousness of its human form. When man realizes this state of divine consciousness, he finds himself in everyone and sees all phenomena as forms of his own Real Self…
Lord Meher, Original Publication, Bhau Kalchuri, Vol. 5, pp. 1642 – 1643.