SEVEN DIRECTIVES FOR MY LIFE

 
In 1969 I was working at a psychiatric research institute near Princeton New Jersey, which shared the grounds with a state mental hospital. I lived in a room in the medical staff quarters but usually spent the weekend with friends in New York. On this particular weekend, however, I had stayed in New Jersey and was in my room in the evening when Kay Mavris, a close friend and sometime lover, called me to say that Baba had 'dropped his body'.

Kay appeared to be devastated because she had followed him through many years of longing to be in his physical presence. I, on the other hand, felt that I had already met him in an internal dialogue at the end of which he had shown me his universal form as the core of myself and of all reality. After this first darshan, I had written him a letter asking to have everything I did connected with him and blessed by him, and also asking how to continue the process of spreading his message.

In his response he gave me seven directives for my life — each expressed in a single sentence numbered One through Seven. Among them he said that the best thing for me to do was to remember him wholeheartedly as often as possible and to love him more and more; that he was pleased with my desire to 'spread his message of love'; and that he would guide me internally as to how to practice the directives in the letter. The letter seemed to me to confirm the reality and substance of our original meeting, and encouraged me to have confidence that the inner presence guiding me since then was really him.