In spite of Baba's ban for a full year on the flow of correspondence to and from Him, and despite His present phase of Seclusion, He permitted me to read out your letter to Him, for it was from one who has endeared himself to Him as Baba's "P.A."!

Without beating about the bush, I will attempt to answer your queries according to indications as gathered by me from Baba. As a matter of fact your long letter can be replied in a short sentence by asking you simply to read 'Meher Pukar,' March 1962 issue, pages 27 to 31. However, I will reply to your four points, as requested by you in your letter, which on the whole seems based mainly on your questioning one of the eight Messages of Beloved Baba that He has given for the opening of Mehersthan on 28th February, 1963. This message reads as follows: “Tear the curtain of set ceremonies and rituals and you will find that I am the Worshipped, the Worship and the Worshipper.”

(1) Your first query is: Whether rituals are to be totally avoided? In reply to this query I must tell you, dear brother, that Meher Baba, as the Avatar of the Age, wants you to believe that He does not want the true worship of His lovers to be entwined by rites and ceremonies of "Yagna" and "Hom-havan" or any other forms of ritual.

Baba does not want His lovers to ever offer their prayer to Him padded by any sort of formal practice or set customs. Any ceremony on which the rust of past ages of formal observance has long since set in should never be entertained in His House of Worship.

Baba has been often stressing that He has come again as the Avatar of this age to cut clean through the thongs which restrict the voice of true worship to God to the point of strangulation.

Beloved Baba further clarifies that when love for God is expressed spontaneously, then it is worshipping Him indeed; and such outbursts of true worship can be seen sometimes in the form of an offering of flowers and garlands, in singing hymns and bhajans and Arti, in ecstatic dancing or rolling in dust, etc., etc. When such expressions are spontaneous — NOT FORMAL — and are in praise of the Highest of the High, they constitute true worship of God, for this reaches Him and is acceptable to Him.

But when the mind expresses itself in patterns of formal rites and rigid ceremonies, it is nothing more than an empty echo of the habit of countless generations, performed automatically without "heart." Baba says that