Born on 25 February 1894, Meher Baba attained God-realization at the age of 19. He embarked on his mission as a Spiritual Master in the early 1920s. On 10 July 1925 he began his silence and did not speak again for the remainder of his physical lifetime. The following statement was made prior to his silence.
“When the Word of My Love breaks out of its Silence and speaks in your hearts, telling you who really I am, you will know that that is the Real Word you have always been longing to hear.”
In the decades that followed he worked intensively with the poor, lepers, and with spiritually advanced souls known as masts. Toward the end of his life he remained in seclusion, for the most part, to complete his Universal Work. In 1954 Meher Baba declared that he is The Avatar (The Ancient One) of our age. Meher Baba dropped his body on 31 January 1969. One day prior to his dropping Meher Baba broke his silence for the first time by speaking the Hindi words “Yaad Rakh,” meaning “Keep on remembering”.
God Speaks is Meher Baba’s most significant published book. While Meher Baba does not emphasize intellect alone as a path to perfection, in God Speaks Meher Baba goes deeper into the subject of metaphysics than most other Indian masters. In a review of God Speaks, oriental scholar Walter Evans-Wentz, the original English translator of The Tibetan book of the dead, wrote: “No other Teacher in our own time or in any known past time has so minutely analyzed consciousness as Meher Baba has in God Speaks.”
God Speaks takes a strictly nondualist approach in explaining the universe and its purpose, carefully clarifying and syncretising terms as it takes the reader through the spiritual journey of the atma (soul) through its imagined evolution, reincarnation, and involution, to its goal, its origin, of Paramatma (Over-soul). The journey winds up being one from God-unconscious (“Beyond Beyond State of God”) to God-conscious (“Beyond State of God”). In elaborate detail he explains the universe is an arena where infinite existence, identifying with the apparently limited soul, becomes more and more conscious of its oneness with itself as the Over-Soul.
