1. TLD/FF: 10-8-27 drafts A and B, p. 1 fills the lacuna in TTL p. 166 with the Marathi sentence: “kasehī karm kele tar māyechā pāsh lāgat nāh”; this text has been slightly edited to make it fit into the greater sentence grammatically. Remarkably enough, this original Marathi sentence is written in the Devanagari rather than the Gujarati script—a rare occurrence in this body of manuscript material. In fact, TTL/FF p. 166 appears to provide a (Gujarati) comment on the matter: “marāṭhī lakhāṇ?” That is, “written in Marathi?”
2. Until this point, the edited text of this lecture has been based on the usual “Tiffin Lectures” sources—TTL/FF p. 166, TTL p. 166, and TLD/FF: 10-8-27 drafts A and B, p. 1. At this juncture, however, three new sources come into the picture. The first is another draft from the Filis Frederick collection, TLD/FF 10-8-27 draft C (which begins on p. 1a and runs to the end of the lecture on p. 4; p. 1 is missing).
Yet the other two additional sources differ curiously from what we have seen until this point. One of them presents itself as a follow-up to the final Tiffin Lecture of 30th August 1927 whose typing concludes on TTL/FF p. 174. The immediately following series of pages, that is, TTL/FF (handwritten) pp. 175-80, provides a handwritten continuation (in a handwriting that does not appear to be Chanji’s). The text of this continuation corresponds almost exactly with that of our main “Tiffin Lectures” sources for the latter part of the lecture of 10th August 1927, that is, TTL/FF pp. 166-70, TTL pp. 166-70, TLD/FF: 10-8-27 drafts A, B, and C, p. 1a, and TLD/FF: 10-8-27 drafts A, B, and C, pp. 2-4. Further (and this is the third of the additional sources alluded to above), this same text appears still again in a separate typed version in ChD 62: pp. 245, 247, 249, and 251. Thus our manuscripts collectively provide us with seven versions of this material, six typed and one handwritten.
Perhaps this portion of the talk was dictated separately at a later date and inserted as a retrospective editorial act into this present lecture of 10th August 1927. The evidence of TTL/FF p. 174 and TTL/FF (handwritten) pp. 175-80, taken on its own, would suggest that this material was indeed dictated on 30th August, as a sequel to Baba’s lecture of that date. For the last page of that lecture in that manuscript (TTL/FF p. 174)—a page that has as its own running head the page number “174”—has a handwritten note in Gujarati at the bottom of the page, below the typing, that reads:
bīj-chhell (4) pānā-ām nathī –
te thaīp karav paḍashe —
That is, “another last (4) pages are not here —/ that needs to be typed.” The following handwritten pages TTL/FF (handwritten) pp. 175-80 have as heads phrases like “continued (175),” “176,” etc. It would seem, then that these handwritten pages were conceived as a follow-up to that lecture (of 30th August 1927).
What is odd about this, however, is the fact (as we have already indicated) that this very material had already been included in TTL/FF pp. 166-70, pages which belong to the same numbered series (with the running heads “166” through “170”) as does TTL/FF p. 174 (with the running head “174”) where the Gujarati handwritten note has been jotted down. Perhaps the writer of the note was unaware that this material had already been typed up and included in the very manuscript that he was appending his note to.
In view of the evidence of the handwritten continuation in TTL/FF (handwritten) pp. 175-80, ought these pages to be shifted out of the lecture of 10th August 1927 and added to the end of the lecture of 30th August? Standing against such a course of action is the fact that four of the typed manuscript versions place this material explicitly in the 10th August lecture. That is to say, TTL pp. 166-70, TTL/FF pp. 166-70, and TLD/FF: 10-8-27 drafts A and B, p. 1 all give 10th August as their date. (TLD/FF: 10-8-27 draft C gives no date, since its p. 1, where the date would by the normal practice have appeared, is missing, though every indication is that that date would have been 10th August; and ChD 62: pp. 245, 247, 249, and 251 have no date citation at all.) In short, we do not know as a certainty why these pages of content were incorporated in the 10th August lecture in most of the most authoritative manuscripts: maybe Baba dictated it on that date after all, or maybe Chanji thought that this content would fit better in the earlier (10th August) lecture than in the later one (of 30th August). In any event, the editors have deemed it best to leave this content where they have found it—in the lecture of 10th August—whatever its ultimate source may have been.
3. TTL/FF p. 167 and TTL p. 167 read: “Now – ‘to get a knowledge’ when and why this Finite state was given (created) to the ‘Sat’, is said to be the ‘Perfect’ state, i.e. to Realize the Original State ‘of God’ which was the first state-” [sic]; TLD/FF: 10-8-27 drafts A, B, and C, p. 1a and TTL/FF (handwritten) p. 175 read similarly. This garbled sentence seems to say, in its first part, that perfection consists in gaining knowledge of ignorance, and in its second part, that it consists in gaining knowledge of original Godhood.
4. In the handwritten version of this passage in TTL/FF (handwritten) p. 179, in the margin immediately to the left of the paragraph opening with the words “Such Sadgurus,” these words appear: “7-12-29/ to begin from here. ”
(The editors cannot determine with surety whether the handwriting of this marginal note matches that of the passage—TTL/FF (handwritten) pp. 175-80—as a whole, though it may well be so.) Now the annotation “7-12-29” presumably designates the date, 7th December 1929. At that time the Meher Message was completing its first year of publication; short selections from the “Tiffin Lectures” material were being published serially as “Spiritual Speeches of His Divine Majesty Sadguru Meher Baba” (for further details, see Appendix 5, pp. 510-14). The editors have not found this particular passage in any of the Meher Message articles, however.