A WITHDRAWAL INTO WORK

 
Sahavas were projected for the Westerners, but before December [1965] came they were postponed, and continued to be put off year after year as Baba's seclusion was extended. This seclusion was the opposite of retirement. It was not a withdrawal from work but a withdrawal into work.

What the true nature of this work might be, even those whose lives were spent in Baba's company knew little. All they gleaned from a rare comment was, first, that it went on unceasingly. "you see me doing all this," Baba told them once during an interlude at Guruprasad in June 1963, "but simultaneously my work continues. It is as breathing is to you — you talk, work, play, eat, sleep etc., but you never stop breathing. It is the same with my work, which continues without a stop whatever else I may appear to be doing."

Secondly, they understood that it was directly related to the world situation at any given moment and carried out 'on the inner planes', invisibly and imperceptibly, in the way that Baba worked on the minds of audiences absorbed in some entertainment.

Thirdly, they could see for themselves that it involved intense suffering both bodily and mental.