Darvish Khan Writes

Baba lovers of northern California are the resistance against the corporate and institutional takeover of  Avatar Meher Baba’s manifestation. We will not abide the slimy acquiescence to powerful subversive interests in commanding the narrative of Meher Baba’s wish.

Meher Baba was not a corporatist nor a supporter of institutional hegemony. He always and unequivocally supported the individual’s relation to God. He never rubber stamped a hierarchical and institutional intermediary between him and his lovers. He was in fact completely against this.

Recent developments in the Meher Baba community give great cause for alarm. Baba lovers must solidly support the integrity of the individual’s relation to the beloved. This is not a commodity to be franchised by exalted institutions, however much money they command.

All Baba groups and organizations should rally behind the integrity of the individual’s relation to beloved Baba. There is nothing else worth living and dying for.

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Hurray, Meher Baba Center of Northern California drew a line in the pharaonic sand! At a meeting last night of the board of directors and interested membership, the board passed a motion to address the Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust, based in India, that it would host its own venue, separate from Sufism Reoriented of Walnut Creek, for a presentation of the Trust’s long range infrastructure plan.

This fracas was occasioned by Merwan Dubash, a trustee of AMBPPCT and Daniel Stone, the leader of this focus group and president of the Meher Center, insisting that there be one venue because “the Baba world is one family”. MBCNC was compelled to remind AMBPPCT that this is not the case, and for excellent reasons.

Evidently, only MBCNC insists that Meher Baba’s “Last Warning” and Eruch’s “Bell of Warning” of 1980 are still in effect. It’s as if the Trust, in honor of the great and late chairman of “Jai Ho” infamy, Bhau Kalchuri, has decided for fund raising purposes that money is more important than the master’s command that no golden calf distract his devotees.

MBCNC acknowledges that there are pyramids to be built and idols to be cherished- but that it will have nothing to do with it. We have a covenant to keep.

MBCNC awaits the Trust’s response.

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Current events raise the question (once again), how competent is the Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust?

The Trust is canvassing public opinion in an entirely symbolic manner by planning four focus group events in England, Australia, South Carolina and California. This is part of an effort to create and finance a long range development plan for the Trust in India which anticipates in time millions of pilgrims to Avatar Meher Baba’s Samadhi.

The Trust is obviously after big money to finance its big plans, and has in fact thrown the No. Ca. Baba group, Meher Baba Center of Northern California, under the bus in an effort to ingratiate itself with Sufism Reoriented of Walnut Creek, Ca. This group has recently completed a 60 million dollar sanctuary largely funded by the world wide syndicated Cheesecake Factory.

Is the Trust really interested in Baba lovers’ input into how the Trust should proceed with its long range development plans? Why is it hosting only four venues for a few hours in each case to canvass opinion? The Meher Center venue will have two presentations, but Merwan Dubash is insisting that MBCNC be combined with SR in a single Bay Area event.

SR is not even a Baba group, but a closed order with allegiance to a so called murshida from a controversial occult lineage– which Meher Baba and his disciples expressly forbade. But they have money.

This Trust sponsored focus group speed tour could have been far more intelligently planned online. Hundreds of Baba groups could have been engaged thoughtfully in a well designed presentation that shared group responses to Trust plans. But the Trust doesn’t want a detailed and thoughtful response from Baba lovers across the world.

The Trust wants money, and they know very well from whom they can get it.

The most laughable stupidity in all this is that the Trust thought MBCNC would just roll over and die.

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The recent and ongoing fracas concerning rogue members of Meher Baba Center of No. Cal. and certain trustees of Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust giving Sufism Reoriented of Walnut Creek a wink and a nod to usurp the integrity of MBCNC is shocking.

MBCNC has had a long history supporting the “Bell of Warning” rung by Eruch Jessawala in 1980. This bell still rings loudly in the ears of many Baba lovers here in California. We take seriously Baba’s admonition to his lovers, and which also applies to SR, to not adopt a spiritual intermediary. Baba has said that for 100 years after the Avatar “drops his body”, it is as if he is still physically among us. This 100 year period is at this time only half over. For a Baba lover to adopt a spiritual intermediary- real or assumed, during this time period, is to insult one’s commitment and obedience to the Master of Masters. It is like a married man taking up with a harlot.

The problem is not simply forgetting what happened decades ago, but inattention to what is happening now. SR is presently breaking historical agreements mandated by Baba and engaging in “spiritual fascism”.

Baba mandated that SR not encroach upon Meher Center in Myrtle Beach, SC., but this is exactly what has happened. SR has no business establishing a presence in Myrtle Beach.

SR has expressed through remarks by Carol Conner, the murshida of SR, a frontal assault on historical fact regarding Avatar’s Abode in Australia. She has brashly declared that Francis Brabazon did not establish SR in Australia because of a “lack of resources”, and that SR is prepared to remedy this.

The taboo subject that throws tremendous light on this gnarly ugliness is the enabling of the late “Jai Ho” chairman of AMBPPCT, Bhau Kalchuri. Bhau in his last years played the guru in a most spectacular manner dressing in white gowns, spouting Jai Ho, wearing and demanding that others wear the “Three Rings” symbolizing the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh, and more besides.

Bhau rehabilitated SR in the decades after Eruch’s Bell of Warning. After Eruch and the other mandali had passed away- all of whom were strongly opposed to the occultism of Jim Mackei, Bhau ingratiated SR for reasons of fundraising. Baba lovers began to forget the “Bell of Warning”, thinking it no longer applied because the “Jai Ho” guru Chairman of the Trust so flamboyantly indicated that it was passé.

Bhau initiated the Baba world into the era of fundraising to support the all important projects that would validate the objectives of the Trust. And no group was more important than SR for the money that it could regularly contribute toward this end.

And this is the same course that the present chairman, Shridhar Kelkar, and Merwan Dubash, have chartered.

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