Question: Is it impertinent to ask why you are focusing our attention on such a high goal rather than showing us the lower planes and giving us an understanding of their properties and functions? The high ideal is so removed from our understanding that it leaves us empty, dissatisfied, still as blind as ever, like a class of children listening to the nebular theory. Without this more elementary knowledge, how can we go back into the world and answer the questions of those who only need and can understand just a little help to solve these problems? We would seem to be then like hundreds of spiritual teachers whose words go over the heads of the humble seekers. Most of them are too tired or too blind to deal with higher concepts. They need the simple remedies first.
Baba: There is no higher or lower goal. There is only one goal—Self-realization. The journey of the planes, from one to the other, is like changing one prison cell for another, or it amounts to exchanging iron fetters for gold ones. In neither case is one free, and it is perfect freedom from the bindings of the physical and the spiritual planes that I aim at. The advancement on the planes may connote progress and beatitude, tempting to the wayfarer; but the allurements of a plane once entered are difficult to shake off. In fact, the bindings [sanskaras] of the physical plane are much easier to destroy than the bindings of the astral planes. I wish you to be free once and forever.
–Silent Teachings of Meher Baba, compiled by Naosherwan Anzar, p127