Baba remained in Hollywood for seven hectic days, each packed full of interviews and receptions. Norina Matchabelli and Elizabeth Patterson had driven all the way from New York to help in arranging Baba’s schedule.
The newspapers had anticipated his arrival, and at a press conference held at 1 P.M. on the day he arrived, Meher Baba gave the following message:
So much has been said and written about the Highest Consciousness and God-realization that people are bewildered as to the right process and immediate possibility of attainment. The philosophical mind, wading laboriously through such literature, only ends up learning a few intellectual gymnastics. The highest state of consciousness is latent in all. The Son of God is in every man but requires to be manifested.
The method of attaining this great consciousness must be very practical and adapted to the existing mental and material conditions of the world. The rituals and ceremonies instituted by the priest-ridden churches have made the process of attainment too dry; and that accounts for the lack of interest felt all over the world toward religious things in general. India, in spite of its high state of spirituality, at the present moment is very caste-ridden because of the enforcement by various cults of a plethora of rituals and ceremonies, which maintain the form but kill the spirit. Forms and ceremonies, instead of diminishing the ego, strengthen it. The stronger the ego, the more aggressive it becomes. In the anxiety to become conscious of a separate self through thinking thoughts such as “I am in the right” or “I am the favored one” or “I only have the right to live,” one becomes destructive.
–www.lordmeher.org, p1643
[Hollywood, 1932]