May 7, 2020
It is not by chance that the current pandemic has brought forward a heightened attention to cleanliness, hygiene and care for our surroundings in every corner of the world. All at once, nearly everyone on Earth is preoccupied with cleanliness in what I called in an earlier message, “a holy ablution” of the planet. Careful hand-washing, sanitizing of clothes and surfaces, special measures to control harmful viruses, etc. are now practiced – overnight! – with a consciousness and frequency never before seen.
Students of Meher Baba’s life may recall periods in his work, such as the Manzil-e-Meem and especially the Prem Ashram school, where he instituted extremely high standards of cleanliness as part of the daily routine. This was not just an ordinary matter of health. Proper care of the body and the outer environment also supports processes of inner purification. Nearly all spiritual traditions incorporate this understanding into their teachings, often through well-defined practices of ritual ablution associated with worship. The essence of this understanding was strongly endorsed by the Beloved. “Cleanliness of mind and body, which is practical spirituality,” Baba said, “should be aspired to by everyone, and can be acquired by anyone.”[1]
This high standard of cleanliness was an integral part of everyday life at Meherazad. You may remember that Mehera washed her hands perhaps fifty times a day. Her companions recalled that Baba had told her, “After brushing your hair, wash your hands; if you pet the dog, wash your hands.”[2] After his passing, she continued these practices every day. She did this happily out of love and remembrance of her Beloved and respect for the sacredness of her surroundings.
Attentiveness to cleanliness and hygiene helps purify and brighten the spiritual atmosphere wherever one may be. It brings the clarity of thought and feeling we recognize as sattvic. Now, through the agency of the pandemic, this principle of cleanliness is being practiced worldwide, and consciousness of it will eventually become endemic. Care and reverence for one’s surroundings, too, may become a pandemic!
In addition, this sudden worldwide halt to habitual patterns of worldly life has brought remarkable changes to the environment as the “man-made world” recedes and the “God-made world” becomes visible again. The skies in major cities are suddenly clearer, the rivers less polluted, inspiring widespread re-awakening to the beauty of Creation—His Beauty!
We may also recall that Meher Baba described his Avataric mission as one of cleansing the world in order to prepare it for the momentous new spiritual age that is now dawning.[3] On the eve of his New Life in 1949, he told his lovers from Hamirpur, “People call me the Lord of the Universe, but I am the servant of the universe. I am the washerman come to cleanse the dirt of humanity.”[4] In the 1950s he described his universal work as “amassing in a universal heap all the accumulated rubbish of man’s ignorance in Illusion that enmeshes him in the false”, and setting a match to it.[5] He explained that the great wars, famines, natural disasters, and epidemics of these times are part of this universal cleansing process. “All the destruction will purge the world of dirt, cleanse it of filth, so that a new order can be established,” he said in 1940.[6] Baba said the divine plan called for “an upheaval in the world which has never before been experienced, as the greatest spiritual revolution of all times takes place.”[7] He called it the spiritual regeneration of mankind, through which “the new brotherhood on Earth will be a fulfilled fact, and nations will be united in the fraternity of Love and Truth.”[8]
This cleansing, in all its outward and consequent inward forms, is another gift of the experience of this remarkable pandemic. It is an act of God’s love for His Creation. When fully expressed, this divine cleansing of the world, inwardly and outwardly, will support a radiant Divine Life, long promised and long awaited, the birthright and destiny of every incarnate soul.
In His Showering Grace,
Murshida Carol Weyland Conner
[1] Lord Meher online, p. 2570.
[2] Mehera-Meher, III, 365.
[3] Lord Meher, 1357.
[4] Lord Meher, 2757.
[5] Lord Meher, 4617.
[6] Lord Meher, 2085.
[7] Lord Meher, 1457.
[8] Listen, Humanity (3rd. ed., 1985), 135.