THE INFINITY OF THE TRUTH

By Meher Baba

Most persons are under the impressions that anything which can claim to have spiritual importance must necessarily be something very big or great from the worldly point of view. Thus for them if an act is to be considered spiritual, it must have far-reaching effects, or must substantially affect an extensive field of life; and they are constantly judging the worth of an action from the point of view of the magnitude of its consequences. Man is ordinarily so much immersed in the objects of the gross world that its dimensions, magnitudes and quantities unconsciously creep into his estimate of spiritual worth, and pervert his evaluation.

All this confusion is due to the fact that man's mind is often dominated by mathematical ideas, even when it is concerned with estimates of a spiritual nature. But that which is spiritually great is different in kind from that which is mathematically great. The mathematical idea of infinity is constructed by imagining the collection of an infinite number of units, each of which has a fixed and identical value or importance; but such mathematical infinity is actually unreachable, even in imagination, because for any imaginable number we can conceive a number which would be greater than that number. But each unit is false if it is taken to have separate and exclusive existence or importance. The mathematical idea of infinity thus turns out to be an outcome of an imagination which is activated by false assumptions.

Spiritual Infinity is not a result of imaginative additions of the false, it is the Reality itself which comes to be perceived when false imagination is at rest. The Infinity of the Truth cannot suffer any increase through any additions; in fact, nothing can be added to it and nothing can be taken away from it, because it is all-inclusive and leaves no room for any other, small or great. It is immeasurable, integral and indivisible.

The Infinity of the Truth remains unaffected by any changes in the universe. All that happens in the universe is phenomenal, and as such, amounts to zero from the point of view of the Truth. An earthquake, for example, is regarded as an appalling and disastrous calamity by the worldly-minded, because of the immense destruction of life and property which it brings; but even a calamity like this cannot in any way touch the Infinite Truth which is at the heart of Reality. In fact, the spiritual Infinity of the Truth