Beginning July 10, 1925, he observed silence for the last 44 years of
his life, communicating with his disciples at first through an alphabet
board but increasingly with gestures. He observed that he had come "not
to teach but to awaken," adding that "things that are real are given and
received in silence."
He was born into a Zoroastrian family of Persian descent. He was
educated in Poona and attended Deccan College there, where at the age of
19 he met an aged Muslim woman, Hazrat Babajan, the first of five
"Perfect Masters" (spiritually enlightened or "God-realized" persons) who
over the next seven years helped him find his own spiritual identity. That
identity, Meher Baba said, was as the avatar of this age, interpreting that
Vedantic term to mean the periodic incarnation of God in human form. He
placed himself among such universal religious figures as Zoroaster,
Rama, Krishna, Gautama Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad. "I am the same
Ancient One come again into your midst," he told his disciples,
declaring that all major religions are revelations of "the One Reality
which is God."
Meher Baba's cosmology may be summarized as follows: the goal of all life is to realize the absolute oneness of God, from whom the universe
emanated as a result of the whim of the unconscious divinity to know itself as conscious divinity. In pursuit of consciousness, evolution of forms occurs in seven stages; stone or metal, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal, and human. Every individualized soul must experience all of these forms in order to gain full consciousness. Once consciousness is attained, the burden of impressions accumulated in these forms prevents the soul from realizing its identity with God. To gain this realization the individual must traverse an inward spiritual path, eliminating all false impressions of individuality and eventuating in the knowledge of the "real self" as God.
Meher Baba saw his work as awakening the world through love to a new consciousness of the oneness of all life. To that end he lived a life
of love and service which included extensive work with the poor, cleaning the latrines of untouchables, and bathing lepers. He saw a responsibility to give spiritual help to "advanced souls," and travelled throughout the Indian subcontinent to find such persons.
These outward activities Meher Baba saw as indications of the inner
transformation of consciousness that he came to give the world. He
established and later dismantled many institutions of service, which he
compared to scaffolding temporarily erected to construct a building that
really was within the human heart. He said that a "new humanity" would
emerge from his life's work, and that he would bring about an
unprecedented release of divine love in the world.
Between 1931 and 1958 he made many visits to the United States and Europe, on one such trip in 1952 establishing the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, S.C. A similar center, Avatar's Abode, was created at Woomby, Queensland, Australia in 1958. From the mid-1960s Meher Baba was in seclusion, and during that period several U.S. drug experimenters were drawn to him in a quest for spiritual truth. Through them his admonitions against the non-medical use of psychedelic and other drugs came to the attention of the news media in the U.S. and the West. He warned young people explicitly that "drugs are harmful mentally, physically, and spiritually," trying to draw them away from drugs and toward a spiritual life.
Meher Baba never sought to form a sect or proclaim a dogma; he
attracted and welcomed followers of many faiths and every social class
with a message emphasizing love and compassion, the elimination of the selfish ego, and the potential of realizing God within themselves. Although his equation of the several manifestations of God was syncretic*, he won many followers from sects and denominations that repudiated syncretism, and encouraged those followers to be strong in their original faiths. After
his death his followers heeded his wish that they not form an
organization, but continued to gather informally and often to discuss
and read his works and express through music, poetry, dance, or drama
their reflections on his life. His tomb at Meherabad, near Ahmednagar,
has become a place of pilgrimage for his followers throughout the world.
His books include "Discourses" (5 vol, 1938-43; the earliest dictated on
an alphabet board, the others by gesture), "God Speaks: The Theme of
Creation and Its Purposes" (1955), and "The Everything and the Nothing"
(1963).

*syncretic: the fusion of differing beliefs, as in religion or philosophy; as opposed to holding any one belief or cosmology to be exclusively the truth.