During his physical lifetime Meher Baba authored many books and messages and arranged for their publication. Since 1969 the Trust has continued to discharge responsibility for his literary legacy, arranging for the republication of the principal classic works in his literary oeuvre and preparing critical editions of new bodies of discourse material recorded in the diaries of disciples.
Since the words of the Avatar always exercise an incalculable impact on posterity, the Trust takes great care in editing and authenticating the texts that it attributes to Meher Baba authorship. Trust publications are works of critical literary scholarship. They provide full information on their sources and edit their source texts responsibly. The general public can read them with confidence that these are indeed faithful accounts of what Meher Baba said.
Based on a 250-page handwritten manuscript that probably records dictations given by Meher Baba at Meherabad in 1926, Infinite Intelligence is the only sustained and extended treatise composed by Meher Baba prior to the dictation and publication of God Speaks in 1955. Conceiving God under the aspect of Infinite Intelligence, Meher Baba’s exposition explores the relations between what he calls “thinking” and “imagination,” the role of Īshwar in the creation, preservation, and destruction of the universe, the binding of sanskaras, and the paths toward Liberation through knowledge, action, concentration, and devotion. A work of major importance, Infinite Intelligence considerably widens and deepens what could be called the “standard account” of his philosophy given in Discourses, God Speaks, and other works from the later decades of his advent.
Thirty-nine pages in Meher Baba’s own handwriting, probably composed by him in 1925, provide the core of this book. The thirty-nine pages are reproduced, first, in full-color facsimile, and afterwards, in black and white with full transcription and translation from the Gujarati when required. In this exposition, Meher Baba sets forth a high mystical metaphysic. Some of its main topics include: a mystical illuminationism (in which Light and Darkness are the primary metaphysical categories); the relations between Self, mind, body, and world; and the deeper significance of the three states of sound sleep, dream, and wakefulness. Originating from the very earliest months of Meher Baba’s long silence, In God’s Hand is by far the longest surviving exposition in Meher Baba’s own handwriting and perhaps the only book which contains only his words in the literal sense.
Published in 2017, Tiffin Lectures compiles fifty-two talks that Meher Baba gave to his closest male disciples at Meherabad between April 1926 and August 1927. Though the lectures range across a wide spectrum of topics and are not organized around any particular theme, all of them address subjects that the men mandali were going to need to know about during the course of their life’s discipleship with him. This book enables present-day audiences to “listen in” on the spiritual training that the Avatar gave to these intimate associates during the earliest days of their life with him.
As a critical edition, Creation and its Causes has been compiled and edited from an assortment of primary manuscripts, some of them in the Avatar Meher Baba Trust Archives and others housed in other archival collections around the world. This section provides facsimile reproductions of all significant manuscript sources used in the editorial process, as well as descriptions of these sources and explanations of their significance.