Anthony Rohan Foley

At the commencement of his 2017 Friday morning “Special Series" of talks, Dr Ward Parks welcomed all present to participate in a group reading of an early draft of a manuscript understood to be Dr Abdul Ghani Munsiff's response to dictation especially given to him by Meher Baba in the late 1940's.   As it turned out Baba was unhappy with Dr Ghani's work saying he had left parts out and made a mess of others, resulting in Baba rewriting the material word for word with the aid of Eruch Jessawalla and publishing it as God Speaks (readable online at ambppct.org - go to eLibrary).   It is understood Dr Ghani’s material was given to Murshida Ivy Duce and Don Stevens to make use of in their work editing and making God Speaks ready for publication by Sufism Reoriented. Ward said that it appears that Part 9: The Ten States of God in God Speaks bares very close similarity in places to sections of Dr Ghani's draft manuscript.   To date it is been understood t...

Stay with God: An Appreciation by Ward Parks [*]             From Friday through Sunday, July 22 through 24, the Meher Center will host a study program on Stay with God, Francis Brabazon’s epic masterpiece. Written at Baba’s express directive and published in 1959, Stay with God is, as Baba’s sister Mani described it in a “Family Letter,” a “work of incredible beauty,” or as Charles Purdom put it, “a presentation of Baba without parallel.” [†] These three days will provide occasion for us to immerse ourselves in the extraordinary poetic brew and visionary experience that Baba’s great poet has offered as perhaps his greatest gift to posterity.             Stay with God was undertaken by Francis in response to an order given to him by Baba at the men’s Sahavas program at Meherabad in 1955. Though the sahavas was intended for Baba’s Indian followers, Francis and Don S...

While living in Roma in South West Queensland in the mid 1990’s, I was intrigued to read about the Boston Baba Boys (Cohen, Dreyfus and Chapman) who bought Avatar Meher Baba’s anti-drug message to the West (Lord Meher: Vol 20).  Ten years later, while visiting the Meher Spiritual Center at Myrtle Beach SC, I enquired whether their library had any videos of talks which these fellows may have given there.  In no time I was sitting in front of a video of Dr Allan Cohen describing how he had participated in the consciousness-expanding LSD experimentation which his lecturing staff Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (aka Ram Das) had undertaken at Harvard University, Cambridge, a short distance from Boston, MA.  I had read a number of “hippy” books about this drug research and the spiritual exploration which acompanied it, and was thrilled to hear Allan’s personal account of the actual goings-on.  His stories had me in fits of laughter.  It wasn’t until library staf...

Meher Baba's Elucidations on Reincarnation  by Dr Ward Parks - Australia 2015 In this modern age of high intellectual development conjoined with mass confusion in the domain of values, one of the Avatar's great gifts to the human understanding has been His elucidations on the subject of reincarnation.  The idea of reincarnation is, of course, an ancient one. In various formulations it dates back to the misty dawn of recorded history especially in the East, but at various times and places in the West as well. Reincarnation and karma - ideas ineluctably linked with each other provide essential metaphysical backgrounds to Hinduism and Buddhism. In a less developed form the belief in reincarnation won a place in the philosophy of Plato and other religious and philosophical systems of the eastern Mediterranean. But in the main part reincarnation has faded in the awareness of the Western world over the last two millennia. The great monotheistic religions of Christ...