UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

 
Satara
August 7, 1955

It was a great pleasure to read your joint letter to dear Baba and Baba too, felt no less happy to note all which you expressed in your letter.

Baba was deeply touched by your devotion and whole-hearted resignation to His will and He wants me to convey His love to all of you. Baba is now free from His seclusion work and so He is giving darshan to all His Bombay lovers.

Those who desire to have Baba's darshan or contact, should approach Baba only through their pure love for Him without expectation of any kind, whether material or spiritual. Henceforth, for all future contacts with His old or new devotees, Baba frees Himself from all promises, arrangements, undertakings and bindings. Only on the basis of pure and sincere love for Baba, should any further contacts be based or established.

I send this bit of information to help all Baba lovers in your group to decide for themselves once and for all, whether they would continue to hold fast to Baba's daaman with the tight grip of pure love alone.

Many times in the past, Baba had stressed that to hold to Him with a grip containing an admixture of love and expectations, would mar the sublimity of the lover's love for the Beloved. The time has now come when the Beloved issues a direct challenge to all lovers to prove to the world at large that pure love for the Beloved expects nothing in return, while it continues to consume the self in the lover to fulfill the Divine Love of the Beloved.

The pure love of a lover of the Beloved is like the flame of a candle. When the lover becomes like the wick of the candle, the Beloved behaves as the wax and the grace of the Beloved then functions as the agency that sets the wick aflame.

The flame of pure love, aflamed by the grace of the Beloved, spreads the light of hope in the darkness of the heart, and while this flame continues to consume the wick, the wax helps the wick to sacrifice its all and glorifies the suffering through the light of the flame. Thus both the lover and the Beloved sacrifice their all to bring Divine Love to perfection.

When Baba was in the mood for giving discourses in the past, He had given the above example for Divine Love wherein both the Beloved and the lover suffer infinitely until the zenith of such love quenches the thirst of the lover and pacifies the expectations of the Beloved.