God Speaks (Hardcover)

~ Meher Baba (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

God Speaks is Meher Baba's most complete statement of the process of Creation and its purpose. This recent reprinting maintains the contents of the 1973 revised edition while presenting the material in a new style. A contemporary format makes the work attractive and easier to read for today's audiences.

God Speaks incorporates all of life into a spiritual saga. The only protagonist is God, and his story encompasses all individual biographies. It is God himself who becomes the three basic processes for the growth and transformation of consciousness: evolution, reincarnation and involution (the spiritual path of return to Himself).

The first phase of God's journey is evolution. It is initiated from a totally unconscious God as if an infinite Ocean were in a state likened to deep sleep. This unconscious God speaks the First Word "Who am I?". This question disrupts the limitless, undivided, absolute vacuum, and its reverberations create individualized souls, compared to drops or bubbles within the Ocean. By speaking the First Word, God establishes the process of Creation, in which he assumes evolving forms to gain increasing consciousness.

Individuality is the vehicle of this quest. Evolution marks a series of temporary answers to "Who am I?" The soul traverses a multitude of forms, beginning with simples gases and proceeding slowly through inanimate stone and mineral forms. These early evolutionary stages obviously have only the most rudimentary consciousness and cannot provide a satisfactory answer to God's original question.

The original query thus provides a continuing momentum for the drop soul to develop new forms each with greater consciousness, including the many plant and animal beings. Every evolutionary kingdom reveals new dimensions of consciousness and experience. Each also offers opportunities to gain different kinds of awareness. For example, when the soul identifies itself with varied species of fish, it experiences the world as a creature living in waterconversely, as a bird, it enriches its consciousness by flying through air.

When the drop soul finally evolves to human form, consciousness is fully developed, but an individual is still not aware of the potential of his or her consciousness.

So the original "Who am I?" imperative persists and inaugurates the second phase: reincarnation. Since consciousness is fully developed, there is no longer a need for evolving new forms. The individual's experience, gathered in early stages of evolution, is now humanized and expressed in countless lifetimes. The impulses gained in sub-human forms can play themselves out in the broader context of intelligence, emotions, choices, diverse setting and interactions with people.

But obviously no single lifetime can bear the burden of "humanizing" the entire evolutionary inheritance randomly or simultaneously. There must be a method for re-experiencing the pre-human legacy in manageable segments. The soul thus experiences alternately a series of opposites, organized according to themes. Accordingly, in different lives, the soul becomes male and female, rich and poor, vigorous and weak, beautiful and ugly. Through exploring the potential of these many opposites, one eventually exhausts all possible human identities and, therefore, has fully learned the entire range of human experience.

Here begins the third phase: involution, the process by which the soul returns to the full awareness of the Divine Force, which created him. As Meher Baba puts it, "When the consciousness of the soul is ripe for disentanglement from the gross world (the everyday world of matter and forms(, it enters the spiritual path and turns inward."

Like evolution, involution has certain states and stages, consisting of "planes" and "realms." But individuality continues along this spiritual path. In fact, the book quotes the Sufi saying "There are as many ways to God as there are souls...."

Each new plane denotes a state of being that differs from the states that proceeded it. The first three planes are within the subtle world or domain of energy, "pran." There follows the fourth plane, the threshold of the mental world, where misuse of great power for personal desire can lead to disintegration of consciousness.

The fifth and sixth planes represent true sainthood, which is understood to be increasing intimacy with God as the Beloved. On the sixth plane, the mind itself becomes the inner eye that sees God everywhere and in everything. "The loving of God and the longing for His union," says Meher Baba "is fully demonstrated in the sixth plane of consciousness."

The seventh plane marks true and lasting freedom. Impressions go. Duality goes. The drops burst and again become the Ocean. God answers his question of "Who am I?" with "I am God." The Infinite has returned to the original starting point. He now knows, however, with full consciousness and full awareness that he was, is and always will be infinite. And he realizes that the entire journey has been an illusory dream, the purpose of which is the full awakening of his soul.

Yet the saga is not necessarily over. Meher Baba indicates that even among God-realized souls responsibilities within Creation may differ. Most play no further active part in Creation. But a rare few make the journey back to human consciousness. Of these, five become Perfect Masters, blending divine consciousness with awareness of all beings in evolution, reincarnation and involution. These five administer the affairs of the universe. And they use their "infinite knowledge, power and bliss for the progressive emancipation of all in the field of illusion."

Meher Baba differentiates these Perfect Masters, who are always on earth, from the Avatar, who is the "that highest status of God, where God directly becomes man and lives on earth as God-man." He further comments that the "Avatar is always One and the same, the eternal, indivisible, infinite One who manifests Himself in the form of man as the Avatar, as the Messiah, as the Prophet, as the Buddha, as the Ancient Onethe Highest of the High."

A little over a year before the first publication of God Speaks, Meher Baba officially declared himself to be that Avatara claim that amplifies the meaning of the title. To the one who accepts Meher Baba's position, God's plan is revealed vividly through these pages.

From the Inside Flap

No other work has yet been published which takes the reader so deeply into the fundamental mechanics of life and the universe. God Speaks is a minutely detailed description of the journey of the soul from the time of its "creation" until it has completed its function in the evolution and involution of consciousness, and has returned to the Over-Soul from which it originated.

The flowering of each stage in the developmental pattern is described from several standpoints; and the characteristics and difficulties of certain key steps along the way are considered in detail. In reading God Speaks one has the sense of an unlimited breadth of viewpoint in which the teachings of all the great world religions are literally brought together "like beads on one string." The special knowledges of each are incorporated into a comprehensive description of the goal of Creation, and certain basic misunderstandings of the teachings of the Messengers of the ages are deftly corrected, so that a consistent, fundamental pattern of the origins and destiny of man emerges.

Students of philosophy and religion will find much material which is entirely new or which had previously been advanced only in very fragmentary form. With precision and lucidity Meher Baba clarifies and defines formerly diffuse concepts. Regarding evolution and consciousness, he says, "It is well to remember always that the beginning is a beginning in consciousness, the evolution is an evolution in consciousness, the end, if there be an end, is an end in consciousness."

On concluding the volume, one is left with the conviction that, regardless of the mechanism by which it may have been accomplished, truly the voice of God has been heard.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 348 pages
• Publisher: Dodd Mead (1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0915828022
• ISBN-13: 978-0915828029
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #370,792 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I realized I was not alone anymore..., May 31, 2000

By	David Silverman "deardavid0" (North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, USA) - See all my reviews

I first read this wonderful book in 1970, when the soil of my life, the ground of my being, had been torn apart by the tempests and storms of growing up in the 1960's, and I had developed an eager and insatiable, even desperate thirst to find out what is my purpose in life, what am I doing here, who am I....

"God Speaks" provided an answer and planted a seed that has developed into a mighty tree whose beautiful and radiant branches have spread lovingly over the entire landscape of my life, even while revealing in contrast ever more clearly the beauty and wonder of the infinite sky beyond. In its last chapter, this book says that the Truth about God and Creation and Reality is still far beyond what can be put into words, but the words of this book at the time not only satisfied my mind about all the questions of why and wherefrom and whereto -- a mind that had eagerly absorbed all the science and math and art and psychology and philosophy it could handle and still came up hungry and thirsty -- but it also seemed to answer questions welling up from deep within that I could not yet even formulate.

The first words of Chapter One still ring in my heart: "All souls (atmas) were, are and will be in the Over-Soul (Paramatma). Souls (atmas) are all One. ..."

This book is really a mighty poem about the evolution of consciousness of the soul, through earthly forms of stone, metal, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal, and human being, and then through numerous lifetimes of every sort of experience -- of being man and woman, rich and poor, happy and miserable, good and bad -- until the soul's consciousness turns inward and it begins to experience stages and worlds of increasing unity of sensation and perception ... until it finally comes face to face with God the Beloved, and after gazing at the Beloved for an eternity of love and longing ... finally becomes one with the Beloved, and realizes Who, in Reality, it has always been.

Once you read this book by Meher Baba, you will never again look out at life with the same eyes.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Straight to the heart, March 10, 2004

By	Woodshed (new york, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This one of the most remarkable books you'll ever read; over and over. It is the book you grab when your house is on fire. People pestered Meher Baba to tell all. He perfered jokes and games. So, the Avatar explains how the whole of humanity is structured. As only he can. There are large fold out illustrations and graphs to augment to His unbelievable words. Mind you, this is not an easy read. I would suggest reading "The Discourses" first. But this is a crowning acheivment amidst a vast array of so called "spiritual" books. I wouldn't live without it.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Only God can write a book like God Speaks!, October 11, 1998

By A Customer

God Speaks is a book you dont't read just once, Meher Baba gave instructions to His followers that they should read it at least 7 times in their lifetimes..Why? Perhaps it is because the author Himself knows that to grasp the sublime that is latent in each mind...one must dive deep and recall and then the words will awake one to the inherent knowledge that "You and I are not We but One"-Avatar Meher Baba...I have read the book 3 times so far, and each time, another revelation comes to me.. imagine...reading the words of The Avatar of The Age...Meher Baba...It is Amazing!!!