The Who’s Baba O’Riley and the “Bargain” into the World of Meher Baba

At a time when the minds saw that Love was coming, and He came with his words and his songs divine, it was the silence that raptured into a world of bliss, and a peace was building the tower of light; He was the lightning in the veins, in the eyes, the sacred eidolon of the sun that shines above the highest of mountains, there was nothing so still before that the nerves confirmed, because His Peace was waging the war.

-Joy Roy Choudhury

Pete Townsend of The Who was a follower of Avatar Meher Baba and in their 1971 album Who’s Next, he dedicated the song Baba O’Riley to Meher Baba and Terry Riley. The song goes like this :”Out here in the fields/I fight for my meals
I get my back into my living/I don’t need to fight/ To prove I’m right… Don’t cry/Don’t raise your eye/It’s only teenage wasteland/Sally ,take my hand/Travel south crossland/Put out the fire/Don’t look past my shoulder/The exodus is here/The happy ones are near/Let’s get together/ Before we get much older…”.The coda of the song has a melodious violin solo based on Indian Classical Music used as a tribute to the Meher Baba, the great mystic who inspired this song. Once again, The Who referred to the lost opportunity that the generation had by reiterating the word “wasteland” and the one opportunity we still have before us to transform ourselves into the very body of love and light. The incarnate flame that burns within us is the source of the all creative inspiration and life-energy and this sacred Agni if properly harnessed can give the who human race the taste of immortality.

We know the that this is the same wasteland that troubled Eliot or Pound few decades ago in between the two great wars. In T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, is a metaphor for renewal of life-energy and faith, which generations have lost due to the lack of spiritual quest and self-conviction which are fundamental to the understanding of such empty, barren states where

” April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain”. (The Burial of the Dead I, The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot).

Spring, the season of fertility and birth-rebirth, regeneration is also, now, the season of death, the “cruelest month”. The “unreal city” of Eliot’s The Wasteland seems to haunt Pete Townsend decades later as he writes about the experience of the farmer’s wife Sally who travels with her man and her children from a peasant countryside in Scotland to the city of London. “The exodus is here”, its a journey or a quest which he talks about, that one must undertake to get together, to find love and harmony. The journey is precariously poised between an unproductive social malaise on one side and an energetic generation of youth on the other who has all the vital spirit and pranic energy but not the deeper quest in life. Meher Baba’s role as the guiding light, as the avatar of this generation is truly significant. It’s the new consciousness he brings with his ideas and vision, with his mere touch and his graceful silence, to revive a race lost in contentment of hallucinogenic drugs and LSD. The greatest thing to happen in the 60’s was the Woodstock, but, it’s the music and the love and passion for such a spiritual unity among people of all languages the key to the understanding of Baba’s messages. It’s from this ideal, that he talks about love and compassion, the divine light and consciousness which is self-transformative in nature because it acts into the very atomicity of matter and evolutes it to higher levels of truth and understanding. In the context of war, Meher Baba says “the immediate problem will not be to stop wars, but to wage them spiritually against the attitude of mind which generates them…”. Thus, he says, what Sri Aurobindo said in Savitri: “This hidden foe lodged in the human breast/Man must overcome or miss his higher fate./This the inner war without escape”. (Savitri- Sri Aurobindo). In Baba O’Riley the song, The Who grapples with this inner-condition, the war waged inside and the external modalities of a impervious existence that has its own rule and societal habits and desires. The external nature and the inner world of the man must strike a common chord, the harmonious point being the condition of surrender of the surrender of the individual self to the Divine Mother, to Avatar Meher Baba because its them who will guide us as the true Sai, as the  One who not merely teaches but actually awakens the divine in us, and thus, finally saves us by transformation. 

Music of the 60s and 70s was thus very important because for the first time through the creative process and through channeling of that, man was able to blend the great spiritual traditions of older civilisations of the East and the West. Its was consequential and imperative since destructive forces are always counterbalanced by forces of love and knowledge and truth albeit in a very subtle and silent way.

Two other songs by the Who “See Me, Feel Me” and “Bargain” were inspired by the philosophy of Avatar Meher Baba.  Pete Townsend considered “Bargain” as an ode to his spiritual guru from Pune, India. He clearly writes this and explains that such entry into the mystical, spiritual world of enlightenment and love is a bargain:

“I’d gladly lose me to find you I’d gladly give up all I hadTo find you I’d suffer anything and be glad…

An Apparition (The Moon Goddess) done by the Mother at Pondicherry (1920-1930). It’s an oil on board painting, she had done sketch before the final rendition “that comes through the still self from the Supreme”. – Savitri: Book III: The Book of the Divine Mother, Canto II: The House of the Spirit and the New Creation- Sri Aurobindo

On the eve of The Mother’s Birthday, 21st Feb, 2011, we pray so that “All things shall change in God’s transfiguring hour”. (Savitri)

“Grant that we may be worthy of this marvellous Presence and that henceforth everything in us be concentrated on the one will to be more and more perfectly consecrated to the fulfillment of Thy sublime Work”.- The Mother

“Even the body shall remember God”- Sri Aurobindo

“A new light shall break upon earth, a new world shall be born, and the things that were announced shall be fulfilled”.- The Mother, 24th Sept, 1954

“Man is the creation of Yesterday. Sri Aurobindo came to announce the creation of tomorrow: the coming of the supramental being”- The Mother

An Apparition (The Moon Goddess): Consciousness-Analogue

In the dancing steps of the light

She saw herself appareled in moon

By the love’s eternal tender flame

By the mystic syllables that transfigure the earth

She in her body, the body itself an imperial orb

That configures a system of the creational universe

On a block of stone, the self-evoluted sign of matter’s cryptic codes

Has the rhythm beats of eternity

For those who are born with sunlit eyes

They know that cells when infused with light defragment and grow

And a new body born from the past

Is the future’s only true real self.

– Joy Roy Choudhury

An Apparition (The Moon-Goddess): Consciousness Analogue

Divine Mother’s The Garden of Light: “Let the light of Truth be born upon earth from today and for ever”. (On Her Birthday, 21st Feb, 1953, Pondicherry, Words of Mother)

A Friend’s Garden, Oil on Board, 1908, France. It’s said that while Mother was spending time at this garden, she fell into a deep meditation where she had complete identification with the earth. At this higher conscious state, she was the earth herself, an embodiment of the four forms of Mother because “there Matter is the spirit’s firm density”, and “a treasure-house of lasting images”. (Savitri, Book III: The Book of the Divine Mother, Canto III: The House of the Spirit and the New Creation- Sri Aurobindo).

The “lasting images” is what the artist in us tries to create because  ever since creation has manifested life in the tiniest monocycle of a cell and from their the evolution in nature has taken its gradual course, man and his relation with the cosmic universe have involved a constant seeking for the immutable forms of beauty and truth,  – an endless search for the immortality because the Creative Spirit knows that death is not the end because “wrong could not come where all was light and love”. – (Savitri Book III Canto II)

Consciousness-Analogue: A Friend’s Garden, 1908, France               

Waterfalls lapping the feet of the hushed garden woods

Wreathing the flowers with the garlands of joy

Pink, ivory and pale rose petals sprinkling the air

With Her fragrance, with Her anointed smile

That blossoms the peach, the wood apples and pomegranates

Here, and now, Her hands wave the breeze of life

She came alone, silent and wonderful

Like a golden swan in the cradle of light

Communing with the changeless stars of human destiny

To lift the earthen hearts nearer to the sun

To lift them from their transitory planes of existence

She alone is the savior, the consciousness that crosses the deep beyond

Into lands of immutable beauty, love and bliss.

– Joy Roy Choudhury

A Vision (Oil on Board) was done by the Mother while she was in France during 1903-08. Though it was somewhat unfinished as she later she recalled, but it still had the sublime beauty of rhythms felt inside of a deep concordat between the heaven and earth, between the eternal divine and the transmutable flux of the earthly consciousness felt through a pale mystic light of the dawn by the lovers of angelic beauty and the incarnate flame because though earth-nature is steeped in inconscience but “still can the vision come, the joy arrive./Rare is the cup fit for love’s nectar wine,/As rare a vessel that can hold God’s birth;/A soul made ready through a thousand years/Is the living mould of a supreme Descent”. – Savitri, Book V: The Book of Love, Canto II: Satyavan- Sri Aurobindo

Right: Recitations from “Savitri” by “The Mother” and Music by Sunil Bhattacharya with Michel Montecrossa

The Mother on “Love”:  “True love, that which fulfills and illumines, is not the love one receives but love one gives.

And the supreme Love is a love without any definite object- the love which loves because it cannot do other than to love”. (15th May 1968)

“Consciousness is a state and a power. Love is a force and an action”.

(17th Jan, 1965)

Divine Mother’s Art and Her Vision (1903-08): “Rare is the cup fit for love’s nectar wine…”- Savitri Book V, Canto: II

Consciousness-Analogue on the painting A Vision (1903-08)

Remembering the early silences of the spring

When flowers bloomed in the ecstasy of dawn

And breathed a motionless life soaring with the winds

In cloud-mist heavens of the eternal mind

Art sprang from the bosoms of cosmic depth

An act transcendental and pure like the sun

A cosmic elevation upon earth’s brown face

A consciousness from distant realms of truth

Took shape into forms and liberated the space

With its own magnificent touch, a journey began

The psychic revealed the beautiful sublime

A vision that found a home in the world of worlds

An idea emanated from the inmost cycles of time

From a still centre that held the petals of life.

– Joy Roy Choudhury

“But as she moved across the changing earth                          

A deeper consciousness welled up in her:

A citizen of many scenes and climes,

Each soil and country it had made its home

Till the whole destiny of mankind was hers”.

Mother’s Self Portrait

Divine Mother on Art:

“There is, behind all things, a divine beauty, a divine harmony: it is with this that we must come into contact; it is this that we must express”. – The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 12. – On Education.- P.239.

“When a painter paints a picture, if he observes himself painting the picture, the picture will never be good, it will always be a kind of projection of the painter’s personality; it will be without life, without force, without beauty. But if, all of a sudden, he becomes the thing he wants to express, if he becomes the brushes, the painting, the canvas, the subject, the image, the colours, the value, the whole thing, and is.entirely inside it and lives it, he will make something magnificent”. – The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 4. – Questions And Answers (1950-51)

Divine Mother’s Role in Emerging New Consciousness on Art: “Landscapes recurred like lost forgotten fields…” Savitri, Book IV: The Book of Birth and Quest, Canto IV: The Quest, Sri Aurobindo

The painting here was done by The Mother while living in France. It’s an oil on board titled “A Landscape with Church Tower” (1897-98) .

It’s a close watching of nature and the varied effects of the changing light cut across a landscape that is calm, serene and warm like a peaceful hermitage. Often a space is filled with colours of different earthly tones and the sky soft like a camisole has the lighter depth of something that is deep, immaculate and imperishable. It’s the consciousness that creates the life-force of the artist who plucks the fruit of colours from the palette of the supermind. This is a state that Mother and Sri Aurobindo envisage for the new race on earth. The descending forces can help perfect the evoluting form with the grace of the Light and it’s this light that the artist strives to seek through the multitude forms of beauty amidst nature’s changing surfaces and scenes but

“This Light comes not by struggle or by thought;

In the mind’s silence the Transcendent acts

And the hushed heart hears the unuttered Word.

A vast surrender was his only strength”.

(Savitri, Book III: The Book of the

Divine Mother, Canto II: The Adoration of the Divine Mother, Sri Aurobindo)

The painting as Savitri saw “Landscapes recurred like lost forgotten fields…” is ever recurrent in Tagore’s musings in Gitanjali: “This is my delight, thus to wait and watch at the wayside where shadow chases light and the rain comes in the wake of the summer. Messengers with tidings from unknown skies greet me and speed along the road. My heart is glad within and the breath of the passing breeze is sweet. From dawn till dusk I sit here before my door and I know the happy moment will arrive of a sudden when I will surely see. In the meanwhile the air is filling with the perfume of promise”. – (From Gitanjali Manuscript, Rabindra nath Tagore)

Consciousness-Analogue: “A Landscape with Church Tower”

All before her eyes was an adoration of the self

Immutably divine and resplendent with lights

Summer’s green eves and mellow afternoons

Were filled with a deep ecstasy in her heart

She felt the beat of the running streams meandering in space

Across undivided time’s beautiful rondure

And fragrance flowered like tresses of a song

Over illimitable landscapes

Glowing with her beauty and touched by her grace

Sweet was the sensation when her aspiration became the prayer

And carried on its wings her poesy and art.

–Joy Roy Choudhury

Divine Mother’s Consciousness and Art: She is the “magnet of our difficult ascent,/The Sun from which we kindle all our suns,/The Light that leans from the unrealised Vasts,/The joy that beckons from the impossible,/The Might of all that never yet came down. – Book III: The Book of the Divine Mother, Canto II: The Adoration of the Divine Mother, Sri Aurobindo.

Mother on Art: “True art means the expression of beauty in the material world. In a world wholly converted, that is to say, expressing integrally the divine reality, art must serve as the revealer and teacher of this divine beauty in life”. The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 12. – On Education.- P.235

“The consciousness must grow in light and sincerity and the eyes must learn to see artistically”. The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 12. – On Education.- P.238.

“In the physical world, of all things it is beauty that expresses best the Divine. The physical world is the world of form and the perfection of form is beauty. Beauty interprets, expresses, manifests the Eternal. Its role is to put all manifested nature in contact with the Eternal through the perfection of form, through harmony and a sense of the Ideal which uplifts and leads towards something higher “.The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother.- Volume 12. – On Education.- P.234.

This early study, an oil on canvas was done by Mother (Mirra Alfasa) in 1895.

Consciousness-Analogue of this painting as perceived by me.

Early Study: Consciousness Analogue

Music evokes a calm meditation of the self

In between sleep and higher states of consciousness

The alchemy has worked, the mind responded

To the forces that came down from the supernal realms

The mystery of art was an impression of that beautiful order

Kindled with the light of a spaceless infinite

Her wings have stretched to eternity

She was the life of the mountains and rivers

And the seas of light that devoured the darkness

She was the flower that held the cosmic serpent

Of a great race of the coming gods

Time’s unalterable truth beckons future’s unforeseen events

And her patience’s slow hand wiped off the tears.

– Joy Roy Choudhury

it was all that was in

through your eyes

we begin…

with the tide comes the flock

to happy land of the rock.

Consciousness-Analogue

Remembering Jim

Through the eyes of the mentor

The earth had a vision of itself

Of what it is, was or will be

If life was frozen on the hard fossil rocks

And never before time had magnified the vision

Then that day is today, the day of reckoning

In the shreds of human history, the book of pain

Was one glorious light

Carved out of the limbs of dawn

For the procreator to manifest his undying love

And the fire that emboldened the golden bliss

It cannot give away to the torrents of death

Its speed revolutionized the sun

Held captive the dancing enchantress of the night

For beauty was born from the eye of a star

And the deserts were filled with roses.

– Joy Roy Choudhury