Conversations about Meher Baba

Epizode

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  Sahavas for Everyone: guest Meher Baba and the 5 perfect masters, July 23, 2026 live on Baba Zoom 24.07.2026 1h 6min

  Sahavas for Everyone, third Thursday of the month.Avatar Meher Baba is in each one of us. And His Love is the focus of this gathering. Open discussion with each session having a topic or theme. Special Guest: The Avatar and the Five Perfect MastersVanessa and Laurent will discuss the advents of the Avatar and the five perfect masters for each Avatar based on beloved Baba's explanations. We have a special surprise show and tell. Jai Baba!Hosted by Laurent Weichberger in SC. This event was recorded live. To be first to be notified of a new video on this channel, please hit the red subscribe button, then the notifications bell. To join future live events, see www.babazoom.net. Please join our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/meherbabafamily
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ”The Journey of Consciousness” July 13, 2026, on Baba Zoom 14.07.2026 1h 27min

  The Journey of Consciousness Culminating in Divine Love The spiritual journey of consciousness, lovingly guided personally by Baba, proceeds through lifetimes from the head down to the heart, and from the heart ultimately into the soul, the “realm of the spirit” as Darwin refers to it. The base of operations for most people is located in the head, the mind, the realm of thoughts, beliefs and theories. Life is seen through the lens of right and wrong, good and bad, spiritual and unspiritual, loving and not so loving. Sooner or later, we become painfully aware of our cramped and limited mental world of time and space as well as the frustrating tension of the opposites. We’ve habitually turned to the mind to tell us what to do and what is important in life, and we find ourselves harassed by thoughts all day long. Eventually, Baba brings home to us the limitations of seeing and reacting to life through the narrow lens of the mind, and coaxes our inner awareness down to the realm of the heart, inspired by His love. Unfortunately, much of this awakening comes through experiences of heartbreak and disappointment. Nevertheless, we gradually find ourselves in a much more expansive place. We are in the realm of emotions, desires, and the deeper feelings, initially a cauldron of powerful forces and impulses that are overwhelmingly difficult to control. Yet compared to the mind, which one might think of as three-dimensional, our base of operations in the heart is multi-dimensional. As the Sufi poet, Hafiz, once wrote, “The mind cannot occupy the throne in the palace of the heart. It can only be its doorkeeper.” In the heart, there is more substance, it is more spacious, and we enjoy flashes of timelessness and, as Baba has said, “fleeting moments of union with God.” Intuition begins to replace the mind as the arbiter of what we do. In one part of the heart, the superficial layer, resides the negative emotions such as anger, jealousy, greed, envy, fear, resentment, sadness, and hurt. And there are also deep-rooted desires and multifarious wants. In all of these, we feel a narrowing down of life. We feel small. Now begins our inner work, and it requires tremendous tolerance to remain consciously in the heart and not continually retreat up into the mind. As Rumi says, we become “a wound without a shield.” But with our persistent and painstaking efforts, Baba begins to transmute these lower selfish reactions to life into loving responses, the divine qualities such as: anger into patience, greed into generosity, desires into purity, resentment into forgiveness, entitlement into gratitude, self-centeredness into empathy and compassion. After many years of inner focus, however, we are astounded to find that even the heart itself is too small! The heart, in its greatest depths, has this profound limitation: it divides life into me and other, me and nature, me and Baba—it splits creation into two. In the mind, the soul is stuck living in a veritable shack. In the heart, it lives in a great mansion, spacious and with windows that can look out on the timelessness of life. But eventually the soul can no longer breathe in this limited, divided space of the heart. It feels suffocated, and longs for oneness. This is when Baba, who provides all the necessary inspiration, begins to draw our consciousness directly into the soul itself. If living at the level of the heart is compared to residing on the rugged terrain of the earth, rising to the level of the soul is like viewing the earth from above, from a transcendent place of oneness, in a most loving place within that still maintains its compassionate participation in the ups and downs of life. The soul has an intimate view of our heart interacting with others and the world. It experiences life as a glorious loving whole; it dissolves our separateness into a supreme completeness. As Rumi, the great Sufi mystic once said, “If the door of your soul were to open for an instant, you would see tha
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  Irwin Luck’s Story: the Internment and the 1969 Great Darshan, July 12, 2026, live on Baba Zoom 13.07.2026 1h 58min

  Irwin Luck's Story: Meher Baba's Internment and the Great Darshan in 1969Irwin Luck was one of the fortunate few westerners to be present at Meher Baba's Internment in the Samadhi on February 7, 1969. Along with others, Irwin had the honor of putting handfulls of earth on Baba's burial box before it was covered. He continued to stay in India along with his brother Eddie until the Darshan began in April. He will tell his remarkable story this morning.Hosted by Betty Lowman in CAThis event was recorded live. To be first to be notified of a new video on this channel, please hit the red subscribe button, then the notifications bell. To join future live events, see www.babazoom.net. Please join our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/meherbabafamily
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ”Opening to Divine Grace” June 30, 2026, live Baba Zoom 08.07.2026 1h 15min

  Dear folks of Baba, Baba has said that His grace “is flowing sufficiently all the time to fill one and all receptacles everywhere,” but “there is rarely a vessel which is not filled with other things. A vessel must first be emptied before it can be filled by the flow of my grace. It is also my grace which helps a vessel to become completely emptied in the first place.” And He added, “The flow of my grace to you depends upon the intensity of your love, for it is love which attracts my grace to you.” In the meetings at the home of Darwin and Jeanne Shaw in the early 1970s, Darwin emphasized emptying out the heart of what Baba called “strangers” to make room for Him and His grace to live in us. Prior to meeting the Shaws, from time to time it was my practice to share my mental and emotional struggles with Baba, but only when they would come up and were too overwhelming for me. In his usual unassuming way, Darwin would recommend to those of us who were new to Baba to be proactive in giving our interior to Him. Darwin would say, “The deeper the feeling, the deeper the healing.” So, with his encouragement, I began proactively to dredge up my emotional complexes and mental conflicts within and imagine them flowing energetically to Baba before me. I became obsessed with emptying “the vessel” -- the heart. In the process, I felt His intimate companionship working with me in my efforts. I experienced that Baba was actually precipitating this inner work, and with this came some measure of His grace flowing into me. Not overnight but after decades, the emotions, desires and feelings in me were gradually being replaced by the divine qualities of “truth, love, purity and beauty” (and all the variations of these qualities such as empathy, forgiveness, humor, patience and kindness). Basically, this is a major way Baba enters our lives and eventually, as the mandali expressed it, “He takes over” -- often very subtly and unostentatiously, so as to avoid awakening the ego! I find that Baba lovers all have their own unique versions of this work and companionship in their lives with Him. It culminates after many years, even lifetimes, in a gradual merging of oneself with Baba, with others and all of life. In Darwin’s experience, it resulted eventually in what he described as “living in and through everyone and everything.” This is the experience that he once privately shared with me. I’m reminded of something Rumi once wrote, “If the door of your Soul were to open for an instant, you would see that the heart of every existent thing is your intimate friend.” To my way of thinking, Eruch described the culmination of the path of self-effacement in Baba in these words, “There has been no Eruch for years. Through His grace, I have become the perfect witness.” This, I feel, is where we are all ultimately heading with Baba. As we go on emptying ourselves, a point is reached where it becomes Baba, our deepest love within, who lives what was formerly our life, and we witness this from a place of pure awareness. I am always disposed to favor simplicity when I think of how Baba and His Grace manifest in my life—it is His One Love flowing into me and into this world. If His love flowing into my life moves me to make efforts to be more loving, I call it His inspiration. If His love flowing into my life helps me in making the difficult decisions in my life, I call it His guidance. If it flows into my heart’s longing for closeness, I call it His companionship. If it flows into my life causing me to expand in being, I call it His unlimitedness. If it flows into my restless spirit causing me to move toward peace and harmony, I call it His Being. If it flows into my depleted body and mind, awakening my vitality and lifting my spirits, I call it His power. If it flows into my depressed and despairing heart, the dark periods of my life, I call it His light. If it flows into me, causing me to make an extra effort to express love b
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ” Loving What Is—Yikes!” June 30, 2026, live Baba Zoom 01.07.2026 1h 20min

  Dear folks of Baba,Sometimes when I would be with Darwin, he would make surprisingly fundamental observations about the Baba community, not critical but insightful, and I would take special note. On one occasion, he happened to say, very casually, that the Baba lovers don’t seem to be content in themselves and with the world around them. He would say, “Be content with what you have and are…Be satisfied with His companionship.” This led me to ponder how poised and relaxed Darwin always seemed, whatever the outer circumstances. He appeared to be comfortable with “What Is.” Years later, when I was faced with a great conflict that I had been suffering with for a long time, I remembered Darwin’s words. At one point during this period, I happened to read a message of Baba’s that I had read many times over the years, and I saw it in an entirely different light. In His discourse on “Will and Worry”, Baba says, “When the intensity of your faith in My will reaches its height, you say goodbye to worry forever. Then all that you have suffered and enjoyed in the past, together with what you may experience in the future, will be to you the most loving and spontaneous expression of My will.” Like a bolt of lightning, it was absolutely clear in that moment that I definitely did not realize that everything which happens to me is “the most loving and spontaneous expression of His will!” I was lucky if I felt ten percent of what happened to me as loving and spontaneous.As it happens to us from time to time in our life with Baba, the shock of His words now meant that I had to recalibrate; I had to do a radical wholesale re-evaluation of a massive part of my life with Him. At first, rather than being critical of what was happening to me and around me, I determined to at least start with accepting “what is.” I had to stop judging what was happening and be open to it as being “a most loving and spontaneous expression” of Baba’s will. Even though my emotions and feelings might be hurt by others and by life at the lower level, inwardly at a higher level I began asserting that all this is His love. Although this was not my experience, my consciousness began probing deeply into what was happening before me, with its oftentimes negativity and harshness. I contemplated the state that Darwin must have arrived at to be so accepting of life. It was during this same time that a book came into my hands, the autobiography of Roshi Kennett, the first female Zen priest in Japan. She was British, and it was shortly after World War II when there was still great animosity felt by the Japanese toward the British. As a result, she suffered enormous persecution by the establishment of the Zen monastery, which drove her eventually to find a place within her that was unassailable to persecution. She writes of that inner achievement: “The only thing I can possibly do in order to learn anything is to accept, with unswerving faith, everything that is happening to me, believing that it is all for my good, whatever it may be. If I respond in any other way, then I shall always be saying that this person is good or that one is bad…I must see what they do as being intrinsically good at all times, even when it works against me.” Her words were an immense challenge to me. Of course, I realized that she didn’t mean that we have to martyr ourselves and tolerate abuse if we can avoid it. Some believe that God is even punishing them, but Eruch would share this metaphor: Baba is a statue (and by extension our own soul), and if we hit the statue, we can’t say that the statue is hurting us; we are hurting ourselves.Baba helped in this overall re-evaluation process. He brought home to me one day that to be critical of others is to judge the work He is doing in each one. If He could awaken more love in someone without forcing it on them, He would already have succeeded. But, as He has said, love cannot be coerced, and even He has to submit to His own law of love. I felt compas
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ”The Level of the Spirit” June 23, 2026, live Baba Zoom 23.06.2026 1h 12min
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  Sahavas for Everyone: guest Paige Hetherington, June 17, 2026 live on Baba Zoom 18.06.2026 45min

  Paige HetheringtonSahavas for Everyone, third Thursday of the month.Avatar Meher Baba is in each one of us. And His Love is the focus of this gathering. Open discussion with each session having a topic or theme. Hosted by Laurent Weichberger in SC. Jai Baba!This event was recorded live. To be first to be notified of a new video on this channel, please hit the red subscribe button, then the notifications bell. To join future live events, see www.babazoom.net. Please join our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/meherbabafamily
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ”A Gift from Mehera,” June 15, 2026, live Baba Zoom 16.06.2026 1h 20min

  Dear folks of Baba, My computer is still being repaired and so I am handicapped in what I can do as far as writing goes. For this reason, I am sending out an exchange I witnessed years ago of a woman who was saying goodbye to Mehera at Meherazad. It was one of those pivotal moments for me in my inner life with Baba in what it conveyed about moods and detachment. Such priceless moments naturally occurred around Baba’s mandali without their necessarily knowing their profound impact. I hope you find it helpful as it was for me. LOVE MUST BE SOMETHING DIFFERENTI found that I absorbed in a very natural way many profound truths in being with the mandali. Here is one example. One deep insight came in a way that on the surface wouldn’t be obvious at all, and this happened one day at Meherazad with Baba’s Beloved Mehera. It was back in the early 1970s when I was young and immature in Baba. Mehera was standing on the porch of the Main House, saying goodbye to a young woman whose pilgrimage had come to an end; she was on her way back to the West. I was there just to say goodbye for the day before going back to Meherabad. Mehera lovingly encouraged the young woman to take Baba with her, not to worry, that Baba would take care of her, and at one point she surprised me, saying, “Sometimes we feel empty and depressed, but we know Baba wants us to be cheerful, so we make efforts to be cheerful.” This made a profound impression on me. I thought to myself, “She is the beloved of the Beloved, and for decades she has been next to the source of all Love, and yet she doesn’t always experience a joyous heart full of Baba’s love?” I concluded, "Then love must be something different from what I had thought.” For I experienced Mehera as the most loving person I had ever met, always radiating Baba’s love, and yet her experience in herself was not always of that love, but actually could be of emptiness. Up to that point, I took the feeling of Baba’s love in my heart as the sign that I was on the right track, Baba was with me; and when I would lose that feeling, I agonized over what I must have done wrong. I’d struggle to get the feeling back. Desperately. But after this small exchange with Mehera, I rarely ever worried again about how I was feeling. I never felt bad if I experienced emptiness or sunk into a low mood. I was able to see after this that love was on a different track altogether; it came from a different dimension within me. I would notice, for example, in times when I felt depressed or sad, my mood never prevented me from responding to a situation with love. Love was not dependent upon my mood or the state of my feelings. Nor did my moods take away from my love. Love was independent. And after that, I didn’t take it personally when I wasn’t experiencing Baba’s love in my heart. I would leave that up to His timing, and I would be deeply grateful when it happened. Baba once said, “Feelings and emotions are only the creation of energy and mind. Love is the creation of the soul.”Over time, I came to experience my consciousness, to use a metaphor, as the earth’s atmosphere, and moods and emotional states are like weather systems passing through it. If I identified with a raging storm in the atmosphere, I would be buffeted around by winds, but if I didn’t identify with the storm, it would pass through me much more quickly and I would not be pulled in. Years later, I began to see moods and emotional states like the seasons. It is not possible to stay in the springtime of moods like many spiritual groups advocate. Spring has to give way to summer where things heat up and a listlessness sets in. Then autumn comes and the natural world begins to shut down, the temperatures cool in a way that’s invigorating. But that doesn’t last. Winter comes, and everything dies back; there can be a feeling of emptiness and nature appears lifeless. These natural cycles are like the feelings and emotions moving naturally through us. And yet
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ""Street-Level" Love," June 8, 2026, live Baba Zoom 09.06.2026 1h 16min

  Dear folks of Baba, In a recent question and answer session in the Original Kitchen, a fairly new person to the Center asked, with genuine sincerity, “What is love?” Because the question was so fundamental and deep, no one among the group was readily forthcoming with an answer. There was a pregnant pause, I called out for help to Baba within, and this is what came out: “I think most of us know what love is when it is expressed. But how to define it? It is something we feel, which is really beyond definition. We see it when someone forgives our careless mistake, when we see someone being very patient in a trying situation, when someone shares their last dollar with us, when someone holds our hand when we’ve just lost someone near and dear.” To my surprise, I realized I was describing what Baba calls the divine qualities as they are expressed in our ordinary daily life, those very human qualities that come from the love within us, naturally flowing from Baba. It is nothing that has to be acquired; love only needs to be unveiled. If we were to give a job description of how the mandali, Baba’s intimate companions, were with us, they expressed nothing that we would call esoteric or transcendent. Their love was beautifully human, so knowable: a walk with us when we were going through a very troubled period, a gift of Baba’s precious hair to keep with us always in a locket, a hot buttered bakri fresh from the oven from the kitchen at Meherazad on our birthday, a leisurely afternoon sharing funny stories from our lives, a feeling of truly belonging which we had never felt in our life before, taking a group of kids on a ride to the beach in the golf cart, which Kitty would do—all expressions of love that we all know so well. When I went to Meherabad for the first time, I thought the mandali would be these great spiritual beings having spent their whole lives with Baba, and I was so relieved to find that they were like my favorite aunts and uncles, not at all the deified disciples of the Christ that religion makes of them. Whatever self-importance they may have once possessed, Baba had eliminated. The invaluable focus of Darwin’s book is to help us remove the selfish tendencies in us that block the flow of this love that naturally longs to express itself through us. When through persistent effort our selfish ambitions, dreams and wants as well as self-doubt, guilt and unworthiness one day go, love is what remains, the love that we are in essence. We find that Baba is always there along with Mehera’s example of one-pointed love for Him to help anyone who longs to love. His mandali were embodiments of how love can be so naturally expressed in this dear world of ours. Rumi once wrote, “On the spiritual path, effort is required, but grace is a thousand times greater than effort. When the morning sun appears, the candle of self-effort can be blown out.” Eventually Baba takes over. Through effort, all the doors, windows and skylights of our house will be opened to let in the light of His precious love. Baba describes Divine love, in His words, as “a fusion of personal and impersonal love.” We are all familiar with personal love which we share with each other, although Baba says it loses much of its charm when it becomes too possessive and is not extended to everyone. Baba defines impersonal love as the things that we do as our duty such as going to work to provide for our family, maintaining the books at our office, the composing of a symphony to touch the hearts of others, picking up the litter on city streets—expressions of love that enhance the world though they are not expressed to any one person. That is, it is equally important, Baba says, that this impersonal side of life which He calls “duty”, our daily responsibilities, is infused with love. We bring Him into the countless little things we do. Otherwise, our life becomes just duty without being enlivened by love. In one of the large grocery stores in North Myrtle Beach, m
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ”Our Real Work” June 1, 2026, live Baba Zoom 04.06.2026 1h 11min

  The Topic: Our Real WorkDear folks of Baba, In this chapter on Our Real Work, Darwin talks about finding what type of service we feel suited to do for Baba. A large percentage of the Baba people are in the healing and service professions, but the majority have positions in a wide range of vocations. Whatever the field, it is possible to serve Baba and participate in His work in the world. I came from a politically active family, and so when I began working at the Center, primarily on the cabin crew, I initially wondered what cleaning cabins has to do with serving the world and contributing to its spiritual upliftment. Reading the following passage from Baba’s discourses helped me understand that it doesn’t really matter what we do externally. That we dedicate our work wholeheartedly to Baba is enough. He wrote: "The unity and solidarity of the inner plane makes it possible for the Master to use his disciple as a medium for his work even when the disciple is unconscious of serving this larger purpose of the Master. This is possible because the disciple, through his love and understanding of the Master as well as his obedience and surrender, establishes a rapport with the Master and comes into tune with him. Those who come into direct contact with the Master receive his direct help, and those who are closely connected with his disciple receive the Master's indirect help. Sharing of spiritual work is by no means one-sided; even the disciples who merely think of the Master or meditate upon him have the privilege of sharing the spiritual and universal work in which the Master might be engaged at that moment. As he is one with eternity, the Master is beyond time and all limitations of time; as he is also interested in the spiritual upliftment of humanity, he assumes many of the limitations of time and his work can be helped by the voluntary co-operation of his disciples. The Master feeds upon the love of his disciples and utilizes the spiritual forces released by them for his universal work. In this way the Master is like the relaying station which receives a song only in order to broadcast it to the world at large. To love the Master is to love all, not merely symbolically but actually; for what the Master receives on the subtle planes he spiritualizes and distributes. Thus he not only strengthens the personal links which the disciples may have with him but also gives them the privilege of sharing his divine work." Whether we are taking Baba’s name with each stride in our morning jog, or designing our flower garden as a loving gift for Him, offering our morning and evening prayers to Him, composing a song to share with His lovers, stirring His name into the batter of the cake we're baking for someone’s birthday, bringing our kids to the Center in Myrtle Beach so they can be in His loving atmosphere, attending wholeheartedly to all the small details involved in our office job—in countless ways we can bring our day in tune with Baba’s loving presence, knowing that He is always pleased with anything we do for Him. In fact, He has said, “Whatever you do for Me is done by Me." Even when circumstances don’t allow for the outer expression of love, we can always emanate Baba’s love from within. In all that we do, as He says, we can allow Him to work through us for the "spiritual upliftment of the world," even if we are not aware of it. Is it really necessary to be aware of this higher purpose? Whatever our outer work, our inner effort is best focused on and occupied with expressing in the world the divine qualities of “truth, love, purity and beauty.” As Darwin says, “We open up to the Master within and invite His divine impressions to filter in through our heart center.” They are “there already, resident in the heart” and only need to be awakened. In our efforts with Baba, our personality, rather than being a base of operations, is gradually transmuted into being a vehicle for His love. Darwin says, “We are heading for a lif
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  Sahavas for Everyone: guest Alex Bober, May 28, 2026 live on Baba Zoom 01.06.2026 1h 4min

  Alex BoberSahavas for Everyone, third Thursday of the month.Avatar Meher Baba is in each one of us. And His Love is the focus of this gathering. Open discussion with each session having a topic or theme. Hosted by Laurent Weichberger in SC. Jai Baba!This event was recorded live. To be first to be notified of a new video on this channel, please hit the red subscribe button, then the notifications bell. To join future live events, see www.babazoom.net. Please join our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/meherbabafamily
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ”Our Personality Self,” May 25, 2026, live Baba Zoom 26.05.2026 1h 17min

  Dear folks of Baba,Back in 1970, I was a young adult living in Schenectady, N.Y. near Darwin and Jeanne Shaw, two of Baba’s early Western followers who had met Him in the 1930s. The meetings held at their home were magical and brimming over with love. Darwin would read one of Baba’s discourses and share invaluable insights with us, and we always felt free to ask questions about what we could do to cultivate the inner life with Baba. It was after one of these meetings, as we were standing around in their living room enjoying apple juice and oatmeal cookies provided by Jeanne, that Darwin looked over very casually at me and said, “Jeff, you are not the personality self.” This Jeff is not me, I thought? I had no place to put that. I don’t think it had ever occurred to me that I wasn’t Jeff! Up until then I had thought that the whole purpose of this life was to get to know myself, to delve deeper and go on improving myself and improving myself until I reached the goal. And here, in his low-key, unassuming way, Darwin was basically telling me I’m barking up the wrong tree!I felt the truth of his words at a deep level within, and I thought, I’ll just file that away for now and see if I evolve into the truth of his words. Over the following decades, I worked on developing some inner space between my awareness (what Baba calls our “witness-consciousness”) and the personality self. In Darwin’s words, “The personality self is just a storefront for the soul. We put so much importance on the window displays, dressing them up and changing them with the seasons, when we could go within and enjoy the priceless merchandise.” This movement toward the timeless and spacious realm within is at the core of Darwin’s book, Effort and Grace, illustrated with ways to bring this about pro-actively. How do we create and develop inner space between our consciousness on the one side and our personality self on the other? One of the major ways is to think of our personality self as a vehicle, a conduit as Darwin would say, through which Baba can express the deeper feelings of our heart. This entails gradually giving up our selfish ambitions, desires and compelling emotions that drag us back time after time into identifying as only our personality self. And if we identify ourself as only our personality, we will respond to others as only personalities and fail to connect to their soul, which is behind and deeper than their personality. That is, our attention will be distracted by their window displays, and we will invariably relate to others, storefront to storefront, so to speak, not soul to soul.What experiences in your life have given you the sense that you are not actually the personality self? Do you find that this realization is a shock or a relief? What emotional experiences, cravings and thought patterns cause you to leave your detached awareness (“witness-consciousness”) and jump back into a heavy identification with your personality? How successful have you been in surrendering some of the heavy baggage and burden of the personality self to Baba? “Sooner or later, you discover you are nobody,and that is not an unhappy discovery!” - Darwin ShawMore Briefly in His love, JeffWe are continuing on page 96.This event was recorded live. To be first to be notified of a new video on this channel, please hit the red subscribe button, then the notifications bell. To join future live events, see www.babazoom.net. Please join our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/meherbabafamily
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ”Loving Baba in Others,” May 18, 2026, live Baba Zoom 19.05.2026 1h 9min

  Dear folks of Baba,Baba said that for this advent “the path is through people.” Baba once said, “All differences between one another are merely superficial and cannot affect the love we feel for each other deep down.” I take this to mean that the love we have for each other doesn’t grow; it is already complete; the challenge is to remove the impediments, the veils, that prevent us from seeing the truth of Baba’s words. In fact, asserting this loving truth inwardly to others sometimes actually awakens a more favorable attitude toward us from those who otherwise might be inclined to dislike us and withhold their love. Why? Because in some small measure, we are reflecting their own loving soul back to them, a truth that we all have been unconsciously longing to experience. Ideally, it is best for us to allow the love in our soul to flow continuously toward everyone and everything, and it is the heart that is our primary vehicle in relating personally to others. Baba once said to the mandali, “Not too near, not too far.” I take this to mean that we have a responsibility to know where to position our heart with its love in relation to others. If, for example, we know a person is prickly or abrasive, we may have to position our heart at some distance so as that it is not unnecessarilyhurt and shut down. In this way, we can continue to send them love safely from our heart. In another example, if we let our heart flow out too intimately to someone, we might inadvertently signal to them that we have a romantic interest and they may feel hurt when we don’t reciprocate. Or, sometimes our own heart is hurt because we have misjudged someone by getting too close, and we may react by withdrawing our heart too far and put up a wall. There are other times when we might be too warm to someone and they feel that we are extending a lifelong friendship to them, something that due to circumstances we may not be able to follow through with. Sometimes it is even wise to keep a polite distance with our heart. In all these examples, it is important that at the level of the spirit our love continues to flow from wherever we position our heart. It is not that the heart is always positioned in relation to others in a fixed place. Even during the course of a conversation, as we are getting to know someone, we may have to adjust our position a number of times depending on the signals we are getting. It is important to be flexible about where we place our heart. Unfortunately, some people, without realizing it, position their heart “too far” from others and miss out on the joy of the give-and-take of love. At times it may be important to position our heart in a very firm yet loving place when we have to be entirely direct with someone who is being inappropriate. Usually over time, our intuition positions our heart spontaneously and fluidly in relation to others without our conscious involvement. Throughout our life, we all have been engaged in this process at one level or another; it is making this more conscious.All this for me has been a work in progress, keeping the heart flowing with love in all circumstances, and through such efforts, a greater sensitivity is developed over time. The main purpose is that we don’t want to let our heart shut down completely toward any circumstance or anyone. This is a tall, tall order. I have come to see it as my responsibility to be aware and sensitive to where I place my heart in relation to others, and if I am deeply hurt by someone, I do not take it as their fault really (even though their behavior may be unacceptable), but as a mistake on my part for having left my heart unnecessarily vulnerable. Over the years, in holding myself accountable rather than in blaming others for hurting me or making me uncomfortable, I have learned from my mistakes. I don’t mean to imply that when someone is very abusive to us that we don’t distance ourselves from such persons, but we hold them accountable when they are trul
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ”A Glorious Culmination,” May 11, 2026, live Baba Zoom 12.05.2026 1h 17min

  Dear folks of Baba,There was a woman who came to the Center who had lost the person most dear to her in this life. She was still in grief. In talking with a fellow Baba lover, he felt she was indulging in her feelings and urged her to get over it. She was deeply hurt but didn’t say anything. He had the mental conviction from Baba’s writings that this world is just an illusion, all its happenings a mere dream, but he did not really have this conviction through experience. If he had, he would have had more empathy for this woman. Within a year, someone who was very dear to him passed on and he suffered the loss profoundly. He found out that his idea that it is all an illusion did not protect his heart from great pain. It is through such experiences that Baba in a natural way awakens in us His empathy for others. Knowing with the mind is not the knowing of the heart. Similarly, some Baba lovers claim to have faith that Baba is in charge of this present war, and why are people worrying about it? After all, they assert, everything is in Baba’s hands. But there are people in our community who have family and friends in this war whose lives are being completely disrupted and even some who are being killed. Isn’t it possible to have genuine faith that it is all in Baba’s hands and still “suffer in the sufferings of others?” The mandali, who more than anyone knew the illusion of life, nevertheless showed such deep compassion and care for us through all our troubles and heartache. For myself, this more universal sensitivity has been very slow and painful to awaken in me. Darwin would say that the mind in collusion with the ego is so powerful that it can convince us that we already know the truth about things. The ego has found a way to keep us from dropping down into our heart where true wisdom resides. Those of us around Darwin often pondered what he actually experienced in his inner life with Baba. It was possible to infer from the things he shared with us what his experience was, but that was all. He was not forthcoming on this subject. But then one day, I said to him, “Darwin, you have a lot of rare wine in your cellar [speaking metaphorically] and if you die, it will only go to your relatives! I think we should bring it up and enjoy it now! You have been focusing on Baba for the last seventy years, year after year, day by day, moment to moment. What is your experience now?” He was amused by this lead-in, and so, at the ripe old age of 96, Darwin shared this with us: “Just as when we breathe all day, we don’t have to say, now it’s time to inhale, now it's time to exhale. This all happens automatically. Eventually life just unfolds. We are no longer trying to get things to go this way or that. We’ve let go. Consciousness is then freed at the level of the world. It goes up to the level of the spirit and out to the far corners of the universe, and we live in and through everyone and everything.” That is, when we’re let out of the prison of our finite identity, our life and consciousness expand infinitely in all directions. Looking across the table where he sat relaxed in Baba’s home in the West, who would have thought that this wizened old gentleman contained such a sublime experience! This was the glorious culmination of a lifetime of loving effort in living for Baba.The inner life that Baba spoke of was relatively unknown to us in our youth, but Darwin kept encouraging us to go deeper into Baba, inviting us to move from the monkey mind down to the unspeakable treasures of the heart. Years later, we discovered there was another side of Darwin that he rarely spoke of, and that was his compassion for this world of ours, the many hours he spent alone working inwardly at great depths to send Baba’s love to all those in need who inhabit this fair earth. In this inner work, he would first send love to his family and when he had enveloped them sufficiently with Baba’s love, he would flow out to the city of Schenectady, and then o
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ”Completeness in Baba,” May 5, 2026, live Baba Zoom 05.05.2026 1h 12min

  Most people feel incomplete, that there is something profoundly missing in their lives. It is not their fault if they think that such a fulfillment lies in fame, recognition, a soul mate, material success, expertise in some field or producing a great work of art. And unfortunately, even when pursued, these goals are never fully secured. In the partial satisfaction of what they think is missing, the goal post keeps getting moved farther away. There is always much more that is needed! That is why eventually everyone turns to God who is Completeness Itself. The divine incarnations are the very embodiments of wholeness, and the feeling that there is something missing is dissolved when in their Presence. Unfortunately, everything on this side of the Divine is incomplete. That is why the focus on the Divine is regarded as the highest pursuit, which is our own completeness, and it cannot be attained at the level of the world. In focusing on Baba in any way, shape or form, we are moving toward completeness, toward our own wholeness. When our wanting the things of this world ends, wholeness can appear. There are many efforts we can make from our side that will help Baba awaken the experience of completeness in us. Two such methods are to cultivate self-acceptance and self-compassion. We are a mixture of love and selfishness, and we are going to witness ourselves falling short of love time and again. We will one day have to accept these shortcomings in ourselves and remain in the present and not be so self-critical. Baba has said that God-realization is the simultaneous experience of the extreme opposites. We have to one day become aware of life in its totality, including the opposites of good and bad, rather than accepting only its good side. This means being aware of both sides in ourselves and in the world, but without acting out the extremes. At the same time, we must remain sensitive and not become indifferent toward the pain and suffering of others. Such efforts lead to wholeness. Another requirement for attaining wholeness or completeness is to stay in the present and not live in the past or future. I once quoted Baba’s words to Meherwan Jessawala, one of the mandali, “Live more and more in the present which is ever-beautiful and stretches away beyond the limits of the past and the future.” I asked him what these words meant to him. He replied, “You won’t find Baba in the past or the future. You will only find Him in the present.” To stay in the present with Baba is to imbibe His oneness and through this, our own wholeness. We must build up an increasing tolerance for mental discomfort, because if we don’t, we will always be trying to escape into the past or future or to some distraction in the present.There is another challenging requirement for experiencing our intrinsic wholeness. Most of us find it easier to experience "the oneness of Baba within” in themselves, but find "the oneness within” in the company of others is a much greater challenge. Baba has said in this Advent that “the path is through people.” This requires experiencing Baba in others, tuning into their essence which lies behind the personality self. It requires a huge expansion of who we experience ourselves to be—that is, to include all others in the experience of our “self”. We have to become more detached from the likes and dislikes of our personality self, to rise above our attitude of approval and disapproval of others, and to penetrate beyond the external level to Baba within others. This oneness, when achieved, is permanent and is untouched by the ups and downs of our reactions to others and the world.When we respond to Baba in others, this does not mean that they will necessarily reciprocate. We have to share Baba’s love with no strings attached. It is enough to offer love from our side, so to speak, and if they respond with love, that is icing on the cake! The results are left to Baba. There are some occasions when we may have to keep an ex
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ”The Divine Qualities,” April 28, 2026, live Baba Zoom 29.04.2026 1h 16min

  Topic: The Divine Qualities, the link to the SoulDear folks of Baba, “To penetrate into the essence of all being and significance and to release the fragrance of that inner attainment for the benefit and guidance of others by expressing in the world of forms--truth, love, purity and beauty--this is the sole game that has intrinsic and absolute worth.”- Meher BabaAs we surrender more and more of our interior to Baba, clearing out the strangers in our heart, we begin to create what Darwin calls “inner space.” With inner-directed awareness, we gradually see into the interior dynamics of our psyche, equivalent to lifting up the hood of our car to observe how the engine operates. We see on one side of this inner space our reactions to life linked directly to our impressions (sanskaras), the conditioning we’ve accumulated in all our lives. On the other, deeper side are our loving responses to life that are directly connected to our soul, to Baba Himself. A part of our essential work is to transmute our reactions into loving responses, through our divine qualities. This is the purification of the heart. As the heart is emptied of our sanskaric reactions, inner space is made for the divine qualities to naturally flow in from Baba. Giving our interior to Baba requires great effort on our part. As we gathered from Darwin, it involves focusing deeply on our reactions and emotional complexes, taking time to feel and delve profoundly into them and then give them energetically to Baba. In this way, these reactions and emotional complexes are gradually dissolved in Baba. Darwin would say, “The deeper the feeling, the deeper the healing.”The divine qualities can all be encapsulated in Baba’s words—truth, love, purity and beauty. For example, Baba says that the opposite of anger (a reaction) is patience and tolerance (our loving response). The opposite of greed (wanting, acquisition) is generosity. The opposite of lust (craving) is purity. The same is true of all our reactions; they have their counterparts flowing in from the soul: for example, retaliation is sublimated into forgiveness, self-centeredness into empathy and compassion, jealousy into appreciation of the qualities of others, suspicion into trust. Our reactions are experienced as a superficial (though sometimes very intense)aspect of our heart, whereas our responses have great substance and depth. In every situation, we are faced with a choice, whether to give in to our reactions or favor our loving responses. It is through the divine qualities coming directly from Baba that our consciousness moves its focus from our ego, with its self-centered reactions, to imbibing the universal love of our own soul. Baba’s divine impressions, as Darwin describes, “filter in through our heart center.” In fact, His Divine Love and Grace is radiating right now in this moment in each of us with full strength; we are mistaken if we think it only happens in His physical presence. I was truly heartened when I read where Baba says that the work we do in cultivating our divine qualities in this lifetime is carried over into our future lifetimes. Whatever progress we make with, say, patience in this life becomes our intrinsic capacity in the next life. We may lose our present material benefits in the next life, but the work we’ve done in cultivating any of the divine qualities is never lost. As our consciousness moves closer to our soul, Baba is then free to express the divine qualities through us. Our heart becomes a vehicle for the divine qualities rather than for our reactions. We are eclipsed by Baba. He becomes more and more the doer. As Darwin would say, we begin to “merge with Him.”Over time, Darwin assures us, “In His infinite, oceanic divine love radiation, we lose track of the little streams of our sanskaric currents. In their place, we experience a steady, sustained flow of truth, love, purity and beauty. We are meant to experience this coming in from Him within us, not in a sporadi
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  Sahavas for Everyone: guest Tracey Schmidt, April 16, 2026 live on Baba Zoom 17.04.2026 1h 3min

  "I have fallen in love with the world." - Tracey SchmidtSahavas for Everyone, third Thursday of the month.Avatar Meher Baba is in each one of us. And His Love is the focus of this gathering. Open discussion with each session having a topic or theme. Hosted by Laurent Weichberger in SC. Jai Baba!This event was recorded live. To be first to be notified of a new video on this channel, please hit the red subscribe button, then the notifications bell. To join future live events, see www.babazoom.net. Please join our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/meherbabafamily
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ”Surrender, A Giving Over,” April 14, 2026, live Baba Zoom 14.04.2026 1h 15min

  Dear folks of Baba, In attempting to surrender to Baba as He has asked of us, if we were to experience that we are actually surrendering our limited love in favor of His supremely unconditional Love, it would be much more acceptable. But we have to actually know and feel this greater Love in the One we are surrendering to. We are not comfortable with blind faith, and fortunately Baba allows us to test His love through the many situations in our life. Once our soul is fully convinced of Baba’s unconditional Love, we can then become completely confident in our efforts to surrender. Here is how Baba, back in early 1968, introduced me to the initial step of what He means by surrender. It was during college, and I found myself in great mental turmoil. I found myself agonizing over what I was going to do in the future, I was deeply regretful and ashamed of many of the things I’d done in my college days, I was nostalgic about my childhood that had been truly idyllic, and, I was faced with the prospect of being drafted into the Vietnam War which I determined was not going to happen! After struggling for months in this disturbing mental state, Baba rescued me one day with these words, conveyed to me within with perfect clarity: “In every moment, there is always something loving that can be done.” With those words came the implication from Baba: just look around and feel what love is prompting you to do. I found that even being in readiness to love was enough for Him. This message from Baba became the blueprint for my life. Years later, in working with Kitty Davy here at the Center, I found someone who was the very embodiment of these words from Baba! I saw that she came—unfailingly--to each moment with full awareness and gave her best in her efforts to please Him.With Baba, I found that surrender is not a one-time accomplishment. It is a moment-to-moment endeavor to try to express love for His sake. Baba brought home to me something that I found supremely important: in trying to love, that is, even if I am doing a poor and inadequate job of it—it is still love itself! It is the intention that counts with Baba. He has said, “Whatever you do with love has perfect results.”On the subject of surrender, Darwin would often share with us the importance of being a vehicle, a conduit of Baba’s love. Ideally, love is coming from Baba through us. It becomes important not to impede this flow from the inner dimension by imposing our expectations, our likes and dislikes and wants on this love as it expresses itself through us; we must eventually surrender completely to this flow of love. In order to accomplish this, Darwin would impress upon us the need to become intimately sensitive to our intuition in the moment, the voice of the heart, rather than the voice of the mind. Ultimately, Baba says, “Surrender is a gift from man to Master.” We need to make continual efforts on our part, however inadequate, to yield to the flow of His love through us. When this becomes more and more our natural state, Baba says that we will one day experience this truth: “He who surrenders knows no one but the Beloved.” He will become our All in all, and His love will be the only doer! A part of surrendering to Baba is our adopting the attitude that it is really Baba doing everything through us, what He calls the provisional ego. About the provisional ego, Darwin says, “It is a matter of taking responsibility for our actions and feelings, yet bypassing the ego and attributing everything to the Master, to His doing. Our purpose is to minimize the sense that we are doing anything.” This means not imagining that we are doing anything in isolation from Baba, that He is a part of and included in everything we do. Darwin confirmed this: “It means not holding anything back or keeping a secret life of your own on the side.” Everything is shared openly with Baba, even our so-called greatest sins. We discover that we can go through our most difficult pe
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  Late Night Chat with Jeff Wolverton: E&G: ”To be natural most godly,” April 6, 2026, live Baba Zoom 08.04.2026 1h 9min

  Dear folks of Baba,In my early years with Baba, I tended to do everything in the extreme. During one period, I had decided to say His name inwardly with each footstep. It was during this time in the early 1970s in Meherazad that Eruch was taking a group of us up Seclusion Hill, sharing stories as we climbed. I was ten or so feet behind Eruch, and at one point I looked up from taking Baba’s name and Eruch gave me a poignant look which clearly said, “Jeff, you are so preoccupied with what you’re doing there that you are not with us in this moment!” At that very moment, I felt deeply the truth of his words. I had been so preoccupied with my little practice that I was not being natural. This is not to say that saying Baba’s name isn’t important and invaluable, but not to the extent that we are elsewhere in the moment and not really present.One day at Meherazad, during this same trip, a close friend and I were sitting just outside Mandali Hall on a bench with Eruch, and my friend said, “Eruch, I work as a house painter, and sometimes hours go by and I haven’t even thought of Baba. What can I do about that?” Eruch replied in his very casual way, “In the beginning, it’s important to remember Baba, to repeat His name, to see the movies, to go to where Baba has been, and to read all the literature. But in time it becomes important to forget yourself. When you forget yourself, then Baba can live through you. You’re not aware of it, but He is living through you. So, lose yourself in your painting.” He affirmed the supreme value of self-forgetfulness. That was a turning point for me in my life with Baba, because I had become a bit rigid and unnatural in trying to remember Him all the time. I had lost the playfulness that had always been a part of me since childhood, the spontaneous enthusiasm of my college days, the genuine fun in life that I experienced over the years. Since that brief, life-changing exchange with Eruch, I have found that self-forgetfulness and remembering Baba make a vital and complementary dynamic in my inner life. Eruch would say, “Get wholeheartedly lost in your activities, and when coming out of that absorption, remember Baba.” And he would add, “When you remember to remember, remember Him!”All the practices we do as a part of our inner life with Baba—such as dressing our soul with Him, saying His name inwardly, our prayers, giving our interior to Baba, the provisional ego, focusing on His companionship--are like golden tributaries flowing into a glorious and magnificent river as it makes its way toward Baba’s all-inclusive ocean of Love. Eventually, all these practices become integrated into what Eruch would call “a natural life” with Baba, in which we forget ourselves as children do. Children spread innocence and spontaneity and love in this world, simply by their enthusiasm in the moment. Being “natural” is not a transcendent state, but is very much in “the here and now”, where we are in the world, in touch with what is happening. Over the decades, as we are swept up more and more in Baba’s love, the separation that we have felt our entire life begins to dissolve: between ourself and Baba, ourself and others, ourself and life. These distinctions gradually blur in the warm and simple presence of Baba’s love.Sooner or later, Baba brings us to a state where we are no longer driven by our usual agenda, ulterior motives disappear, and our life requires little micro-managing on our part. This does not mean that there are no ups and downs, but we take them as welcome challenges to be overcome with Baba. We will eventually find that the extremes of life, often experienced in youth, have been miraculously harmonized in a way that we could not have imagined! We find that Baba knows exactly what He is doing with each of us to bring us to a place where we are on our knees in gratitude. We realize that Baba has delivered us naturally to a state far more loving and full of warmth than we could ever have imagined po
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  Caregiving Discussion Group Part 2, April 4, 2026, live on Baba Zoom 06.04.2026 1h 53min

  Last Saturday's discussion on giving and receiving care was so well-received that we wanted to give another opportunity for people to share. Many of us are at a time in life when we're either receiving or giving care to friends, family or pets. We can use some shared wisdom to buoy our spirits when caring gets tough. Join us this week! Last week's meeting is recorded at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3JpkDRHFQ8Hosted by Betty Lowman in CA This event was recorded live. To be first to be notified of a new video on this channel, please hit the red subscribe button, then the notifications bell. To join future live events, see www.babazoom.net. Please join our Facebook group: www.facebook.com/groups/meherbabafamily