To Be Natural

“Be natural” is right up there with “don’t worry be happy in my love,” as one of the most frequent directives Meher Baba gave to those who came to see him. For instance, at the men’s Sahavas program held in India in September, 1954 he said: “Today I have three points that I wish to convey to you. The first is that I want you to be completely natural and absolutely frank . . .”; and later added, in relation to this point, “I am your Master but I am also one of you and one with you”; and again, revealing how naturalness was inherent in his own nature: “I am at every level and act according to that level. With a child I am a child; with the highest saints I am one with them. It is My nature to be absolutely natural even with beloved God . . .”

Today we seem to have lost sight of what it means to be natural in the growing unnaturalness of our lives. Essentially we have forgotten that our natural state is to “stay with God.” In this light, to be natural is simply to return to where we are most at ease, most poised, and most integrated. It is to become fully human.

It is worthwhile to remember that the syllable hu in hu-man has etymological roots that go back to Sanskrit and the Avestan language of ancient Iran and is found today in Arabic where it means He or God. It is heard, for instance, in the traditional Sufi chant Allah Hu. And manas also has its origin in Sanskrit and roughly translates as our thinking function, and so putting these together, to be human is to think like God. Or better still to let God do the thinking in us. This is our natural state of consciousness.

For people who met Meher Baba he came across as the embodiment of naturalness. The perfect human being; totally one with his inherent divinity. His gestures, the way he moved, his facial expressiveness, right down to his cheerfulness and sense of humour, all spoke of total naturalness. His divinity shone through his human naturalness. And what marked his naturalness was a kind of effortlessness in the midst of action.

Paradoxically, in a life filled with distinct phases of activity, including long periods of travel, and of busy work schedules, Meher Baba remarked in Nasik in 1937, “I never make plans, never change plans. It is all one endless plan of making people know that there is no plan.” One obvious way of interpreting this is to say that Meher Baba solely responded to God’s promptings in him; this, in a sense, was the one constant plan – a kind of open-ended non-plan.

In a startling insight which cuts like a knife through much contemporary philosophical thinking Meher Baba states: “Existence exists. Being Existence, it has to exist. Hence Existence, the Reality, cannot have any purpose. It just is. It is self-existing. Everything – the things and beings – in Existence has a purpose. All things and beings have a purpose and must have a purpose, or else they cannot be in existence as what they are. Their very being in existence proves their purpose; and their sole purpose in existing is to become shed of purpose, i.e., to become purposeless . . . Love alone is devoid of all purpose and a spark of Divine Love sets fire to all purposes. The Goal of Life in Creation is to arrive at purposelessness, which is the state of Reality” [Meher Baba’s emphasis throughout](The Everything and the Nothing, 1963, p. 62).

In this statement of divine wisdom, many of Meher Baba’s ideas converge and are grounded in this clear declaration of truth: the idea of naturalness, of effortlessness, of having no plans, of purposelessness, and the way of love. And perhaps this is how we should live in the world?

Yet for a Western-conditioned mind, the idea of leading a purposeless life is unthinkable. For having a purpose in life is seen as foundational; it is an unquestioned assumption – to take away purpose is tantamount to sinking one’s ship in mid-ocean. But the point to be made here, and the one Meher Baba seems to be directing us to, is that our ship won’t sink if God is the captain.

Much more can be said here but let me conclude with the idea that unnaturalness always comes from conforming to something that is outside of us, while naturalness is always personal and empowering. Here again, Meher Baba confirms this view when he states: “In love there can be no pre-prepared ways; it cuts its own way; it is creative. You have to find your own way. I am right within to help you.”