I started traveling to India in the 1970s to visit Meherabad and Meherazad. One of the things that struck me so clearly from the beginning was the simplicity, purity, informality, and authority of the various close ones who lived their lives with Avatar Meher Baba.

In early 1969 I founded the Meher Baba Bookstore in Pasadena, California which in 1974 evolved into the Avatar Meher Baba Center of Southern California. I had the feeling from the beginning that making available Baba's message of love and truth to the minds and hearts of people was crucial. In those days the various mediums for achieving that ideal was through books, posters, pamphlets and records by and about Baba — from all over the world. Of course another medium was through myriads of invited guests who spoke about their lives with Baba.

From the beginning I had a strong sense of posterity related to Baba’s message. I remember talking with Sufism Reoriented’s Murshida Ivy Duce about this back in the early 1970s and she jokingly said that her nickname was Ivy “Posterity” Duce because of her fastidiousness in preserving Baba’s message both in book form and in films. She wanted to be sure that his message was available impeccably throughout the ages and available for all.

Therefore, the more time I spent in Mandali Hall and Meherazad, the more passionate I became about preserving the stories that the mandali told about their lives and experiences with Meher Baba. They were first person witnesses to the Avatar’s life. This would be the first time in history that not only were the Avatar’s words preserved in book form during his advent — via books that he himself dictated and reviewed for accuracy — but also the Avatar’s close disciples could tell their own stories personally.

Additionally, the sharing of these stories would not be hampered or filtered by the memories of the various listeners, but instead would be preserved forever, without the foibles of human memory, by the use of newly available technology. In this case it was audio and video recorders.

This opportunity was unimaginably important and looming right before me. Imagine! I had the opportunity to preserve forever the words of the Avatar’s close ones. That had never before happened. And I could do it! Yes! This would not be a case of stories handed down for a couple of hundred years from person to person and then finally recorded on a sheepskin or early paper medium. This would be direct information from the source recorded unfiltered and made available to all — free of charge and forever!

So then it became a matter of acquiring the right equipment — and after a lot of trial and error for a few years and sharing with others doing similar work — I acquired my final set of recording machines…a pair of Sony WMD6Cs. These were small compact professional portable audio cassette recorders. These recorders had a number of professional grade features including Dolby C noise reduction, tape bias selection depending on what sort of tapes one was using: metal, chromium dioxide, etc, as well as pitch adjustment.

Accompanying these professional WalkMan cassette recorders was a Sony ECM939LT microphone which I purchased via the grey market as it wasn’t available in the USA.

Over the years, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, I recorded hundreds and hundreds of mostly 90 minute audio cassette tapes. For the most part I would sit in Mandali Hall, Meherazad with the recording equipment set up next to Eruch and would turn the cassette recorder on when Eruch started in the morning. Of course, a portion of what is recorded is chit-chat; such was the environment of Mandali Hall. Yet there also was a treasure trove of stories to be collected, told mostly by Eruch and Mani.

The original set of tapes was reviewed for excerpting stories by Kanji Miyao in Los Angeles. Care was made to leave out any personal information that could be embarrassing to the conversants. But the breadth and depth of the stories recorded is immeasurable. And interestingly, often the same stories are told at different times over the years with slight variations, according to memory and circumstance.

For example there are a number of versions of Meher Baba’s meetings with Kirpal Singh and Gadge Maharaj. Each is somewhat different and each brings new information.

And sometimes there are contradictions! Part of the fun is finding out what they are and usually finding resolutions elsewhere amongst the mandalihall.org treasure trove!

One of the most important factors in recording these stories — and there are stories from many, many other mandali members and lovers of Baba — is the atmosphere of Mandali Hall and the simplicity of the mandali themselves. For example, as Eruch is informally telling a story, one hears birds chirping in the background, children playing outside, people chatting on the benches and sometimes rain pouring down — all of it most natural. All of this goes to reveal the unaffected atmosphere around the mandali — as well as the atmosphere around Baba himself.

For archival purposes, all of the cassette tapes were duplicated onto new cassette tapes and the originals unused except for duplicating to cassettes and DVDs. They have also all been digitized and stored on multiple servers on Amazon’s AWS and our website’s Squarespace servers.

The main work for all this copying as well as making the talks available on our website for direct download or via a daily podcast distribution has been done by Ray Lee. He is the webmaster of mandalihall.org.

All of Baba’s mandali were excited about Baba’s life and message being spread and they expressed an enthusiastic endorsement of our Mandali Hall project. Both Eruch and Mani, among others, told me personally that they loved the idea of these tape recordings being spread to the world both in making edited talks available but also transcriptions of those talks. They said that Baba’s life of love and truth is “Treasure For The Looting,” and that we should not hold back in our efforts to make these talks freely available.

This is hardly a surprise when we think that many of the books of the mandali’s, including the numerous books of Eruch’s stories filled with his life with Baba and Bal Natu’s many stories in his books were originally transcribed and edited from recordings made in Mandali Hall and other places. All of these stories of life with Baba fill in and express not only his divinity but his humanity as well. Beloved Baba was “a man amongst men” as Eruch loved to say and it was our duty to let others know about him.

One of the beauties of Mandali Hall Talks is that each person is free to listen at their leisure to as little or as much as they like - from anywhere in the world - at no cost. There is no barrier to entry. There is no secret mantra or hidden password. No people to placate to get the goods, no spiritual stature to attain before the Avatar’s pristine message of love and truth are available to you. You can dabble, nibble or gorge yourself. Your choice - all between you and Baba’s inner pull inside you.

Call For Help in Further Spreading the Message

We also wish to revisit all our existing tapes and extract many more stories from them. And we need help to accomplish more story excerpts — or curated content. If you are interested in joining us in going through the tapes, digitally of course with a view to editing, please send an email to mandalihalltalks@icloud.com. We need to add more members to our team. The pay is great. You will definitely receive either an increase or decrease in your sanskaras!

Also since Mandali Hall Talks is an oral repository of the mandali’s and other lover’s experiences, we welcome audio tapes - whether individual or collections from others. Please contact us for more information!

One of our current projects is transcription. We are looking for volunteers to help us transcribe various talks. We provide the transcription equipment and the formatting guides for the transcribers as well as the talks we are working on. Our goal is to eventually have all of the talks available for transcription download as well as audio download.

If you wish to join us in this important transcription project or have some experience with the fun of audio editing, please send an email to mandalihall@icloud.com. Along with the transcription project, parallel projects involve making hundreds of new podcasts available from unreviewed raw tapes as well as attempting to “clean up” existing tapes to make them easier to listen to.