Talk:Perfect Master (Meher Baba)/Archive 1

I see no reason why to keep this in a separate article. The term Perfect Master is widely used. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 15:10, 11 June 2008 (UTC)


 * This article is not a superset or a subset of the Meher Baba article, and so merging is not a good idea. This article describes Meher Baba's definition of the term Perfect Master, which is a fairly broad body of knowledge of interest to very few. The article is more likely a candidate for deletion than a candidate for merging. That said, I'd argue against deletion, if the matter comes up. --Nemonoman (talk) 01:15, 12 June 2008 (UTC)


 * The issue is that the term can be defined in the article about Meher Baba, and does not warrant a separate article. See Perfect Master, which presents sourced information that describe the the term is used in the same context in Sufism and Advanta. Merge is necessary. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 05:20, 12 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Also note that articles cannot be based solely on primary sources. This is needed to comply with WP:NPOV. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 05:22, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I would prefer not to bring the article to AfD, and would suggest to merge it instead. But if you insist, we can place the article in AfD and seek comments from other editors that way. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 05:30, 12 June 2008 (UTC)


 * As written, the article is more reasonably merged with Perfect Master than Meher Baba. There are important differentiations that would warrant a separate article on Meher Baba's descriptions and definitions, but these are buried in the article -- what the newspeople call 'Burying the Lead'. May I suggest, Jossi, (since at the moment this appears to be little more than a dialog between the two of us) that you give me and a couple of other likely suspects a chance to roll up our sleeves and have a go at making this article better. THEN lets reconsider its fate.


 * The primary sources tag is well deserved, and I am frankly concerned that the topic is so rarefied that there are not too many NPOV secondary sources. If not enough, then the info is no more valid being merged into any other article, IMO, the article itself might better be deleted.


 * Can we agree to a few weeks to improve before doing either, however?--Nemonoman (talk) 11:41, 12 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Sure. Take your time. My arguments for merigng are: (a) There is no reason why the material cannot be presented in Meher Baba; (b) If there are no third-party sources independent of the subject, the material can be presented at Meher Baba per WP:SELFPUB, but not in a separate article. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 15:48, 12 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Jossi. I think improvements to the article will better define whether to delete or merge, and if to merge what to merge it with. Keep this article on your watch list, and I'll see if I can dig up some independent sources. I have a few likely candidate books and journals in mind.--Nemonoman (talk) 16:47, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Excellent. Take your time... ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 16:54, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Hey this page should definitely be merged with the Perfect Master page and not the Meher Baba page. I know a Baba person very very well and they have lots of words besides this and to put all those words in the Baba article is just silly as that page is about the man and not every term he used. If you read the Meher Baba discussion page you see this page was created to make it clear when it was not at the Perfect Master page what was meant in the context. Now you want to get rid of that purpose by having the word link to nothing when there is a Perfect Master page to link to? What then is the purpose of a Perfect Master article if not to be linked to?? Let's pull up our sleeves and fix the Perfect Master article to include all this by Baba so that it serves the reviewer's concern, and everyone else's. Why would you just redirect this page to Meher Baba when there is a Perfect Master article that it can redirect to? I can't believe my eyes how silly. The whole purpose is to have a clarification to link to. I'll start if no one else does. Gosh! DeanaG (talk) 01:31, 23 June 2008 (UTC)
 * As you can see from the current Perfect Master article, the term is not proprietary to Meher Baba, quite the contrary. This material belongs in the Meher Baba article. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 01:41, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Merged
I have not seen any solid arguments to keep this as a separate article. The material fits really well at Meher Baba. I have merged the material that was sourced to there, as well as added additional missing references. ≈ jossi ≈ (talk) 03:10, 23 June 2008 (UTC)


 * My impression is that the changes you made to Meher Baba and Perfect Master do a good job of addressing the situation. I do think an article on Five Perfect Masters might be relevant. --Nemonoman (talk) 22:53, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

Unmerged?
This article was restored a couple months ago after being merged, but why? - Owlmonkey (talk) 21:28, 21 January 2009 (UTC)


 * There was some talk about this between two Wikipedia editors above, but the article has expanded since then. Meher Baba has a very specific in-depth meaning of this term and uses it exhaustively in his books. He may have even coined the term in the English language since no one has been able to find any citation of it in English prior to his use in his 1926 works. There is more that still needs to be added to this article. The word appears 45 times in his major book God Speaks and 25 times in his second most major book, Discourses, first published 1938 in English. Meher Baba's definition of the term is specific to the rest of his teachings and is not simply a borrowing of a phrase. He carefully defines the term and demarcates it from other types of advanced souls of different types, borrowing from Sufi and Vedantic terminology. It is very possible that Meher Baba was the first to coin this term in his current use as a synomym for satguru and qutb, as no early references have been found yet. He does not mean it as a 'title' that is bestowed, but as a unique level of consciousness that he goes into great detail to bracket out from other uses of the term. It is one of the major terms in his work, defined in a very particular and elaborate and unambiguous way, and is also the name of a book written about Meher Baba, "The Perfect Master." Baba also introduces his own concept that is distinct from other uses of the term, "perfect master" in that he speaks of "the five perfect masters" which is a concept all to itself. If you examine the above discussion you will see some mention of moving this article to one by that name because it is even more specific. This is unique to Meher Baba as far as my reading goes. For these reasons and some others this article is likely to expand gradually over time. For that reason it seemed a good idea to keep the article separate from the general term so as not to over-dominate the other uses. Someone might be a perfect master cheff, but that is a different meaning, and an encyclopedia is an attempt to be specific, such as when there are several movies by the same title. I hope this helps answer your question. LittleDoGooder (talk) 14:34, 27 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Fine to have a separate article if it's distinct. From reading this one now, it's not clear to me what is distinct about his usage compared to the more general term. What do you think is distinct about it? - Owlmonkey (talk) 17:56, 27 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree with Owlmonkey. There is nothing distinct in this definition. It is just like all the others. I say we merge it. Timetemplate (talk) 18:14, 27 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree. Definitely merge.AguireTS (talk) 18:16, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

I give up. Okay, let's go ahead and merge it. LittleDoGooder (talk) 18:19, 27 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I think there are some other articles that might be merged. For example, I think the Meher Baba article should be merged with the Avatar article. I don't think that warrants a whole article by itself when there are a whole lot of avatars. Timetemplate (talk) 18:40, 27 March 2009 (UTC)


 * So come on. Let's get busy and merge these.Timetemplate (talk) 19:56, 27 March 2009 (UTC)


 * There are so many distinct contexts and usages associated with the term Perfect Master. You might reasonably assume that there's one usage per Guru.


 * Originally Perfect Master was meant to be a disambiguation page, not an article. If an attempt is made to merge this article into Perfect Master, either the Meher Baba part will overwhelm the page and provide undue weight, or the Meher Baba section will need to be signficantly and harmfully reduced. At some point, additional Perfect Master (Somebody's Usage) articles will and probably should be created. This article represents a model, in effect, of what those addtional articles might look like.


 * For these reasons I advocate maintaining this article unmerged. --nemonoman (talk) 13:33, 31 March 2009 (UTC)


 * In light of Nemonoman's points that I think are good points I want to rescind my earlier call to merge. I'm also for maintaining this article unmerged.AguireTS (talk) 14:40, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

The disambig approach seems good. The distinctions now on Perfect Master though are widely varied, from freemasonry to Meher Baba to someone's performance title. I guess what I was imagining, and if we're thinking in terms of increasing specificity, then something like a Perfect Master (Spirituality) would probably be less specific than this one. But it might require some citations that compare the views of different gurus on this point. Do we think a comparison is helpful or possible? - Owlmonkey (talk) 17:12, 31 March 2009 (UTC)


 * "Do we think a comparison is helpful or possible?" I think you'd basically be asking for trouble. Even the original merge suggestion about this page might reasonably ascribed to an agenda, or at the very least a POV. --nemonoman (talk) 17:24, 31 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Why would you want to write an article that compared two books by the same title where there is similarity. The two spiritual uses of the term are solely by Prem Rawat and Meher Baba that I can find. But there is so little overlap in their definitions. Rawat calls Jesus the perfect master while Baba clasifies Jesus as an avatar, distinct in Baba's explanations from perfect master. Baba has there are five perfect masters always, Rawat always one meaning himself in this time. These are different concepts. You could merge Mormoism with Protestant for comparison, but why? So it is hard for me to see how a comparison article between two masters brings clarity to users of Wikipedia? I'm for whatever causes the most clarity and the least confusion. AguireTS (talk) 17:49, 31 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I would say the "Perfect Master" is Jargon, but as with most jargon, individual groups interpret the phrase individually. Where that Jargon is both well-documented and notable, I would suppose a specific article is in order. Compare and contrast is probably not possible since the building blocks of the individual "Perfect Master" definition are just as idiosyncratic. Perfect Master is a term used by Paramahansa Yogananda as well. I remember that much, although I'm too old and tired and sick and stupid to recall his precise definition.  --nemonoman (talk) 20:44, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

If people like Paramahansa Yogananda and many others are talking about this term, then why is there nothing [linking to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Perfect_Master] the Perfect Master article? If there are so many I wonder why there are no links, except from Prem Rawat and Jossi. I think it is just Prem Rawat who has this word and maybe some want to make it seem a big deal. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.204.47.141 (talk) 21:48, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

There are a lot of discussion pages linking to it such as Nemonoman and Jossi and no articles, except those linked to it by Jossi. What is with this? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.204.47.141 (talk) 21:51, 31 March 2009 (UTC)


 * I don't know enough about these subjects to write all these articles. Swami Muktananda and Sri Ramakrishna also use the term. Eventually I'm sure some smart people will enter the fray. In the mean time, your point is what? This article shouldn't exist because other articles don't exist? Questions: Is the subject notable? Is the article documented? Is this article essentially different from the article where merge is proposed? Please give me a break. --nemonoman (talk) 01:24, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Mmm, thanks everyone for weighing in and especially for the thoughts on who else uses the term. I don't know much about it's usage, but this discussion cleared up a lot for me. And thanks nemonoman and others for the ongoing work. I do think this article should exist and the top level "perfect master" is so broad i agree it's just a disambiguation page effectively and that does seem appropriate. After this discussion I'm in favor of keeping the article distinct. Maybe someday there will be more breadth for other teacher's views and then some logical / conceptual taxonomy would be possible. But no expectations that we'd have to write any of those to have this one. I wonder now if we should add short links on the disambig page to the other teachers too, even if they don't have specific pages on their usage yet, as a way to invite folks from those communities to write about it. Or maybe request input on those teacher's articles talk pages? Thanks again. - Owlmonkey (talk) 05:58, 1 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks Owlmonkey, but I have had very very little to do with this article other than argue over merging. Props belong to AguireTS, jossi, and many others. I too thank them.--nemonoman (talk) 16:23, 1 April 2009 (UTC)