A STRANGE TALE
FROM A SANE PERSON

 
YLM (Yedulla L. Muniraj) next introduced me to Dr. Murli Kale, one of those exceptionally noble persons whom you naturally feel greatly honoured to meet. Dr. Kale had been with Meher Baba intermittently since childhood and later was a close companion in His New Life phase, a phase that has been referred to in all important biographical books on Meher Baba.

Dr. Kale was surprisingly free from ego. We felt disarmed in his presence. Frankly, though he listened more and spoke little, whenever he spoke he made us feel like a group of Gratianos(1) with two grains of wheat in two bushels of chaff. Nevertheless, we pestered him with questions regarding his experiences with Meher Baba, to which his oft-repeated remark was that all experiences except the experience of ultimate and universal reality were, according to Meher Baba, a big zero. But I kept on tenaciously inquiring and then one day he had this to tell:

"Baba was always insisting on the importance of implicit obedience regarding His instructions, however strange those instructions might sometimes appear to be. On one occasion Meher Baba gestured to me to attempt to fly! I, without debating the instruction, leapt up with all my might and tried, and then fell down with slight bruises. But Meher Baba was clearly pleased with me for my implicit obedience. The episode was over there and then without a comment.

"However, some time later, a strange event transpired in my life that might have either killed me or injured me seriously. On my way up to the top of a cliff, I put my foot on a stone that treacherously rolled away and I slipped and fell from the cliff, a hundred feet or thereabouts down. But to the utter astonishment of others I was found gathering myself up to climb the cliff as if nothing had happened. This seemed to defy the laws of gravitation."

Not to mention, of course, momentum and physiological trauma.

When I asked Dr. Kale how he escaped being killed in that precipitous fall, he said, "Although I went down with a terrible speed, just before I touched the ground the momentum suddenly decreased, in spite of the laws of physics, so much as if someone made me gently waft like a bird and then made me alight on the ground like one of the members of the feathered clan."