Meher Baba said more than once that the illusory world around us is nothing more than a bubble – “so easy to prick”, he said. He told the mandali that the Earth, which has been evolving for more than four billion years, could be destroyed in seven days. But why go to all that trouble, when he can accelerate the leap to mankind’s maturity with a few submicroscopic, dancing viruses, whose mutations have already changed our world dramatically over the past two years and continue to do so. These dramatic physical, psychological, and societal changes are all necessary stages in the plan of his Manifestation. They are laying the foundation for the New Man, whose new outlook on life will no longer be motivated by the individual ego, no longer dominated by desires and cravings. All of that must be cleared away before the New Creation can take root. Old and new cannot live side by side, for, as Murshida Duce often said, “You can’t have a little hell in heaven.”
It has interested me to see the way in which the various strains of the coronavirus have focused their attacks on the respiratory system, specifically impacting the nose and throat. The most virulent mutations can take away the senses of smell and taste for weeks or months. Why is that important?
The physical senses are the chief instruments of the ego, the “eleven doors”, or indriyas, as Upasni Maharaj called them, through which desires are stimulated and expressed in action. Of these, the mouth is paramount, for it is not only the portal for satisfying personal cravings for food, but also the vessel of individual ego expression through speech;
it houses what has been called, “man’s most loosely connected and least vital organ – the human tongue.”
One might say, then, that the virus appears to be targeting the physical tissue mediating the ego itself. The structure of the ego must be uprooted and eradicated if mankind is to be transformed into the New Man. Over time, we will see long-term changes in the function of the brain and the sensory-motor system. This divine “reprogramming” cannot be avoided. The pandemic, as it has been unfolding, appears, at the moment, to be the fastest and most efficient way for Divinity to initiate this process on a global scale.
What the successive waves of the pandemic all have in common is their ultimate target – the separative self. The virus in all its forms presents a continuous existential threat to the expression of individuality, preference, selfishness, distinctions, and differences. Finally, people in every part of the world will recognize and act on the shared understanding that the way to lasting happiness is by “all of us taking care of all of us”. Self-giving becomes part of one’s DNA, so to speak, as one is transformed. Then the New Man is born. And how else could this entirely new way of life be adopted so quickly everywhere in the world?
In His Showering Grace,
Murshida