… The entire creation is a “Game of Love” or leela [divine sport] which God enjoys at His own cost!
… So my message to the film world is: Do not play to the gallery or the salary, but play to the Infinite within. Live in the presence of God, even while acting your part, so that you can be true to yourself, to your partners and employers, and to the larger and One Indivisible Life of which you are each an inseparable part. If the world is a stage, God is the only producer, and you can never be anything but a trivial actor if you are not in unison with Him.
– Meher Baba
आपने अपना बनाया, मेहेरबानी आपकी
हम तो इस काबिल ना थे, है कदरदानी आपकी
मेहेरबानी आपकी, आपने अपना बनाया
आज हमने दिल के बदले, आपको दिल दे दिया
इस इनायत, इस नवाज़िश, इस करम का शुक्रिया
हमने भी दिल में छुपा ली, ये निशानी आपकी
मेहेरबानी आपकी, आपने अपना बनाया
क्या बताएँ आपके बिन और कुछ भाता नहीं
हमको अपनी खुशनसीबी, पर यकीं आता नहीं
एक तो पैग़ाम-ए-उल्फत, फिर ज़ुबानी आपकी
मेहेरबानी आपकी, आपने अपना बनाया
आप मिल जाएँ तो फिर दुनिया में कोई गम नहीं
क्यों न मिल जायें की पूरब और पश्चिम हम नहीं
बन गया मेरा फ़साना अब कहानी आपकी
मेहेरबानी आपकी
हम तो इस काबिल न थे, है कदरदानी आपकी
मेहेरबानी आपकी, आपने अपना बनाया
Lyrics: Raja Mehdi Ali Khan
Singers: Lata Mangeshkar, Mahendra Kapoor
Music Director: Madan Mohan
Director: D. D. Kashyap
Aapne Apna Banaya Meherbani Aapki
https://youtu.be/4j0BWnETBd8
https://youtu.be/7eYd3OfJivU
https://youtu.be/ySnIQF3C12I
. . . A large darshan was held on Sunday, 1 May 1960, when thousands attended. Notable among them was a famous Indian actor, Prem Nath, 34, who came late in the evening with his small son. Baba surprisingly agreed to grant him an interview. The precocious boy recited [from Shakespeare] Hamlet’s soliloquy in English before Baba “To be, or not to be …”
Often, during Baba’s previous stays at Guruprasad, many screenwriters from Bombay would come to Baba, wishing to obtain his blessings for success in their film ventures. Baba would always impress on them the necessity of portraying spiritual truths in their movies. During 1960, several influential persons connected with the film industry came for Baba’s darshan.
One day (23 May) D. D. Kashyap, 50, a Bombay film director, came for darshan in the morning and stayed for two hours. Baba remarked to him, “I know everything. Even then, I want you to introduce yourself to me. All this is to meet you on your level. I am happy to see you. Are you happy? Have you any worry?”
Kashyap said, “Nothing special.”
“When one attains a human form, whether well placed in life or not, worries in a way become inevitable, but one should not succumb to them.”
Kashyap said, “Formerly, I was well placed in life and high in the film world as well. During these last few years, however, I’ve had to experience many ups and downs. And today, as I have the fortune to sit at your holy feet, I realize all the more that whatever has happened was worthwhile, and that it was all the will of God.”
Pleased, Baba commented:
This is a good way of understanding events in life. Read God Speaks. If you understand it properly, you will grasp what I am saying. You will find that there is nothing in the world to worry about. Whatever happens, happens due to impressions or sanskaras. Sanskaras make the dream of creation appear to be real and lasting, and create undue worries.
The so-called good times are like happy dreams. Owing to the congenial atmosphere, they become a long and pleasant sight, and you want to enjoy them more and more. But when you awake from sleep, you find that the world of dreams has no value.
Bad times are like frightening dreams. You crave to remove yourself from such situations as early as possible. For example, if a tiger leaps right onto you in your dream, you awaken instantaneously.
It is God’s Plan to awaken everyone from the Dream of Creation and make him live in Him and experience His infinite bliss. The law of opposites operates unfailingly to stage the so-called good and bad times. And in His compassion, God leads everyone and everything toward Himself, Who is beyond good and evil. So there is really not a thing to worry over.
I am Eternal Bliss. I eternally suffer too for those who remain steeped in ignorance, as the being of everything and everyone in illusion.
The director told Baba part of the story of his recent film, Maya, about a wealthy boy who falls in love with a poor slum girl and uses his wealth and influence to help the poor. Baba commented:
If you read God Speaks you will have a wider view of the spiritual panorama of the Divine Drama which reveals the secret of creation. The entire creation is a “Game of Love” or leela [divine sport] which God enjoys at His own cost!
In the motion picture industry, you should also introduce spiritual truths, but do so gradually. This is the need of the time. If you become successful in it, it will be profitable to you in both ways, materially and spiritually. However, while directing or producing such films keep in mind that, except God, everything is illusion. Then the work will not bind you, and the heart will become more and more pure to reveal God’s treasure.
One Persian couplet states the following:
God the Beloved says to the lover:
Vacate your abode of its millions of strangers;
Then only, will I enter. I feel shy of strangers!
And who are the strangers? Wants, desires, thoughts! They are all so compressed within you that they leave no room for God the Beloved, whom you would invite in.
As the strangers begin to leave the heart, it becomes cleaner and purer. Then God peeks into it, and His all-loving glance wipes out all worries. And the glimpse of God that one experiences leaves no scope for any doubts about His sweet will that manifests through “good” and “bad” times.
The God-realized Soul lives in the world, but the world does not and cannot touch him. But to achieve God-realization is not child’s play. For this, one has to surrender all — body, mind and heart — to the Perfect Master.
At this point, Kashyap quoted some lines referring to the intense longing for union with God. Baba liked them and remarked:
It is a nice quotation, but how does one create such longing in his heart? That is the difficulty. One must feel from the core of one’s heart that it is impossible for him to live without seeing God. His condition should be like that of a fish taken out of water. When such longing continues, one has the fortune to see God — the Ocean of Effulgence.
The intensity of longing necessary for one to become one with God can never be measured, howsoever high the gross standard. Such longing is a rare experience, altogether unique, and it is exclusively for one who is ablaze with the spark of divine love from the Perfect Master.
I am pleased with you. You can contribute much toward making good films by introducing spiritual truths to the public. But be honest. Let not hypocrisy creep into your dealings. Try to respond honestly to the dictates of your conscience. I am with you; I am within you. But you should take me with you. My blessings.
https://www.lordmeher.org/rev/index.jsp?pageBase=page.jsp&nextPage=4669
May 1958,
… During his stay in Guruprasad, several celebrities from different Bombay film companies came for Baba’s darshan. One day Baba explained to a group of them:
For better or for worse, the world of motion pictures has grown extensively within the larger world of so-called realities. But the film world is not foreign to the “real” world — the two are affiliated so intimately that they can be seen essentially to be made of the same fabric. Everyone is, in a sense, an actor and the world has often been compared to the stage by poets and philosophers. In point of fact, much of what passes for “action” in modern life can be called little but “acting,” and so the larger world has little ground to regard only the film world as being imitative.
In the film world, the actor has to think, feel and act according to the pattern held before him — to mirror, though temporarily, the personality of the character being portrayed by him. This can be said to be true to a considerable extent of those outside the world of motion pictures who struggle to follow the conventional pattern of living as they imagine it is expected of them, even if it cramps their inner individual expression. This is so not only figuratively but literally. While looking in the mirror, people often see themselves more through the eyes of others than through their own. The reflected image evokes in their minds the impression they will make on others and the expectations which others have of them — and the best that most can do is to try to look the part they play. Thus, the mirror literally and figuratively has become such a seemingly indispensable part of modern life that we might almost name this age a mirror-civilization.
When the actor plays the part of a king, he knows it to be an illusion and has, in a sense, an advantage over the king in the outer world who is not necessarily aware of any illusion. Both, however, are equally helpless in their failure to find the Real. No one condemns the actor who plays the part of an emperor or reformer as being a hypocrite, for although he appears to be what he is not, his honesty is taken for granted because his audience knows that he is acting a part. But there are many outside the world of stage and screen who, in actual life, do not appear what they really are. The former are on the screen of their creation; the latter are behind the screen of their creation.
There are specific claims and privileges as well as specific duties and potentialities that no actor can afford to ignore. An actor who may be technically faultless in his part is yet trivial and worthless if he tries to evade his inherent spiritual potential. The film world cannot escape its obligations to the larger world on which it makes so substantial an impression, and these obligations demand that its spiritual potential take precedence over the desire to make money. The cine-writers [screenwriters], the producers and the actors should realize their spiritual potential instead of looking at their art merely or mainly as a business. The more vividly they realize this, the more dignified and satisfactory will be the results of their efforts, and their inner account with themselves will be vastly gratifying even though the same might not be said of their account in the bank. If the film world cannot or will not give the greatest importance to this spiritual potential, it is a failure.
The ordinary man, whose urgent need is to relax from the stress of life, to lessen the sense of insecurity and try to fill the emptiness within (for which greed and war are mostly responsible) turns instinctively to the fleeting diversion of entertainment. And the film world affords this to a great extent. Therefore the film world, which still has one of the greatest scopes for influencing the lives of myriads, should ask itself whether it is utilizing its spiritual potential to the full so that man may be helped in his search for Truth, or whether it is merely pandering to his pleasure of the false; whether it is encouraging and inspiring youth to face the responsibilities of the world of tomorrow, or retarding youth’s inner growth with an overdose of sex and violent crime films; and whether it is striving after wealth and fame at the cost of man’s inherent thirst for the spiritual and uplifting.
The correct solution of every problem can come only from Indivisible Truth. There can be no factitious cleavage in the unity of life by magnifying the often fallacious distinctions between theory and practice, the artificial and the natural, the real and the false. The emphasis of every aspect of the One Indivisible Life must be on the underlying unity, not on apparent differences — and this applies with as much force to those in the film world as to those in the outer world.
The great initiator of the Truth of your being is divine love — love that burns the limiting self, that disarms all fears, that rises above temptations, that is deaf to the voices of lust and jealousy, that expresses the infinite spiritual potential. Those in the film world have also to play their part unreservedly in the divine game of life, aspiring to the highest within man. Then only can they find real beauty; and then only can they fully express it.
The spiritual potential of those in the film world, though in no way different from that of those outside it, must often be differently expressed. You can, even as an actor, experience and express divinity. In the world of the motion picture and by its means, you can learn and you can teach. But if you do not find love or happiness, truth or fulfillment in yourself, you cannot truly impart them to your audience. You cannot inspire unless you are yourself inspired, nor can you awaken love in insensitive souls without yourself being pierced by it.
The actor has to realize that real and living beauty is made manifest only by discovering and releasing the spiritual potential within himself. Artifice can, no doubt, do much to heighten the fresh and radiant beauty that is natural to youth. But this is artifice and not art, and such transient beauty is poles apart from real beauty. Without vision your art will be shallow; do not therefore hesitate to glean that vision from the Great Ones. This will give you a living inspiration, bringing fulfillment in your life.
So my message to the film world is: Do not play to the gallery or the salary, but play to the Infinite within. Live in the presence of God, even while acting your part, so that you can be true to yourself, to your partners and employers, and to the larger and One Indivisible Life of which you are each an inseparable part. If the world is a stage, God is the only producer, and you can never be anything but a trivial actor if you are not in unison with Him.
https://www.lordmeher.org/rev/index.jsp?pageBase=page.jsp&nextPage=4350
GOD SPEAKS by Meher Baba
The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose
https://avatarmeherbabatrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/godspeaks_p1.pdf
https://avatarmeherbabatrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/godspeaks_p2.pdf
Hindi-English Dual Language Edition:
https://avatarmeherbabatrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/HindiEnglishGodSpeaks.pdf
Meher Songs 