I HAVE NOT COME TO GIVE SIGHT TO THE BLIND

 
When Phyllis left the family in 1964 to go to India to meet Meher Baba, her oldest child, Mimi, a very sensitive and compassionate person, asked her to leave a gift for Tibetan orphans. So after meeting beloved Meher Baba, Phyllis asked Sarosh Irani to help her family to give a gift of thirty dollars (five dollars per person) to Tibetan refugees.

Sarosh took the money, but being a close devotee of Meher Baba, he first asked Baba permission to distribute the money. Baba told him instead to give the money to a home for the blind in Ahmednagar, the city he had chosen for his home in India. Sarosh told Phyllis about the disposition of the gift when she returned the next year to accompany her nearly blind partner.

Phyllis thanked Sarosh, satisfied that he had done his best by letting Meher Baba decide how the gift should be dealt with. It was deemed an honor to have the Master's attention to one's small donation.

When Baba met Lyn, whose eyesight was deteriorating with the congenital eye disease retinitis pigmentosa, he said to Lyn and those gathered around him, "Lyn is more fortunate than the rest of you, for he sees less of illusion. I have not come to give sight to the blind, but to make those who see, blind to illusion, to see God."

Baba encouraged Lyn to go on proudly despite his worsening sight, painting his pictures. Baba had written to Phyllis the year before that there is no known cure for retinitis pigmentosa, and that no one knows when the curtain of sight will irrevocably fall.

So Lyn began to paint beautiful portraits of Meher Baba. He painted 500 paintings over twelve years, all a gift, for he believed he did not retain sufficient eyesight to continue painting at all before his seeing Meher Baba. As Phyllis felt isolated without the intimacy of relations with people, Lyn too felt depressed and in despair before he met the God man.