Sustainability is the global crisis of our time. The machine age, symbolized by the automobile, is carrying us off the cliff. We, the lemmings, are driving the car. It really does seem as if we are powerless to slam on the brakes.
Followers of Meher Baba can take hope, if that’s the right phrase and attitude, in Baba’s two car accidents; one in Prague, Oklahoma on May 24, 1952 and the other in Satara, India on December 2, 1956. Baba and several of his disciples suffered severe injuries, and one died in the Indian accident. Baba said of his injuries that the machine broke his bones in order for him to break the backbone of the machine age. About the Oklahoma accident, Baba said “America has long been clamoring for my blood.” This accident began as a cross country car trip that started in the Carolinas and which happened to retrace the route of the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of Cherokee and other native tribes to Oklahoma. His beloved and most important disciple, Mehera, also suffered severe injuries, especially to her face and skull. They both shed blood on American soil.
Baba claims he slammed the brakes on the machine age. We have to wait and see what that entails. In 1954 at Meherabad, India, Baba issued his Final Declaration. This was two years after the accident in America and two years before the accident in India. This is one of the most intriguing and arresting statements he ever made.
The Final Declaration announces that he will suffer a strange disease which will cause his humiliation, result in the breaking of his silence (a decades’ long physical silence), effect his violent death and result in his glorification. And immediately before or after the breaking of his silence, 3/4 of the world will be destroyed. This series of events will be of a short duration, and is referred to as his Manifestation, which will be followed by 700 years of increasing love and peace, after which he will return again which will be the juncture of the beginning and end of a cycle of cycles, representing billions of years.
This announcement was amended by two subsequent announcements, a Clarification and a Confirmation, which state that the Final Declaration was given in both his language and our language, and is not all to be taken literally.
Baba dropped the body in 1969, 15 years after the Final Declaration.
The Avatar is the Sustainer, the Preserver and Protector of all. Each of his advents makes the adjustments necessary for creation to continue. Our machine age is increasingly being recognized as an extreme crisis in sustainability that cannot continue for much longer. The brakes are being slammed.
