REINCARNATION & KARMA
AVATAR MEHER BABA at Arthur's Seat in Mahabaleshwar, India. Painting by Charles Mills.
Man’s search for immortality is as old as man himself. Does the spirit continue after the death of the physical body?
Avatar Meher Baba has explained that the spirit never perishes, and the Self at the root of all our individual selves is, indeed, eternal. One picks up and drops many physical bodies.
You reap as you sow: this, in a nutshell, is the law of karma. And karma is the engine of reincarnation. What is left unfulfilled in one lifetime is fulfilled in future lives.
The discussion, led by scholar Dr. Ward Parks, will focus on Meher Baba's revelations on reincarnation and karma, with references to other spiritual traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.
In this modern age of high intellectual development and mass confusion of values, one of Avatar Meher Baba's greatest gifts to human understanding is His explanation of reincarnation, says Dr. Ward Parks.
Ward will speak for about an hour and a half followed by a question-and-answer session.
PROGRAM — Tuesday, NOVEMBER 1, 2016
- 6:00 p.m. - Talk on "Reincarnation & Karma" by Dr. Ward Parks
- 7:30 p.m. - Questions & Answers
- 8:00 p.m. - Close
The event is free and is open to the public.
DR. WARD PARKS - A SCHOLAR ON THE WORDS OF AVATAR MEHER BABA
Dr. Ward Parks is an author and one of the foremost scholars on the writings of Avatar Meher Baba, an Indian spiritual master (1894-1969) who declared himself to be God in human form.
For the past several years, Dr. Parks has been traveling around the world giving multi-day, intensive seminars and talks on the writings of Meher Baba.
He is the editor or co-editor of the following Meher Baba books: In God's Hand (Beloved Archives, New Jersey, 2000); Infinite Intelligence (Sheriar Foundation, 2005); the Revised Sixth Edition of Discourses by Meher Baba (Sheriar Foundation, 2007); Early Messages to the West (Sheriar Foundation, 2009); and Divine Theme, second edition (Hyderabad: Meher Mownvani, 2010). He is currently working on a set of Meher Baba's discourses known as the "Tiffin Lectures."
Before going to India in 1993 for spiritual training, Dr. Parks was a tenured associate professor of medieval studies for 10 years, specializing in Old English at Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge.
He earned his BA in English Literature from Harvard University (1974) and a MA in English from Emory University (1977). His PhD in English Literature is from the University of Missouri. His most important academic book is Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative: The Homeric and Old English Traditions, published by Princeton University Press in 1990. He has also published around 35 scholarly articles.
Dr. Parks first heard of Meher Baba in 1970 when he was a freshman at Harvard University. He made his first pilgrimage to Meher Baba's home in India in 1972.
In 1993, Dr. Parks left the academic world to become a spiritual trainee in India at the Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust. Since 1997, his principal work at the Trust has been editing Meher Baba's words. Dr. Parks is also a prolific composer of music, writing more than 400 songs and ghazals (a poetic form consisting of rhyming couplets and a refrain, each line sharing the same meter).
Dr. Parks spoke at the Ojai Library in 2014 and 2015. He looks forward to returning.