THE DIVINE MOTHER HERSELF

 
I left Europe with high ideals about Sadhu-hood. Swami Vivekananda's famous "Song of the Sannyasin" was so vivid in my mind. But what an awakening I had in the Himalayas, where I spent nearly a year in a modern ashrama in inward solitude. How orthodox the sadhus were about external observances! The ideals of the "Song of the Sannyasin" were hardly realised in actual life.

How entirely different I found Meher Baba and Meherabad to what they had been pictured to me! The Master, a personification of the highest spirituality and love, and Meherabad so peaceful and appealing! The very atmosphere seems to be charged with spirituality and love, which literally radiate from the personality of my beloved Master. All seemed so natural and homely, all seemed to love their "Baba," as the Master is affectionately called by the devotees. And Baba, simplicity and homeliness himself, free from that awe-inspiring solemnity attributed to the occult hierarchy.

That love which I had craved for, and had been denied in my own family, I experience here more and more as the days pass by. It needed only a few days to set my mind at ease and Baba struck the keynote when he told me that he would help me to become a real Sannyasin by renouncing everything in my mind.

The first teaching I received from the Master was about the three stages of intellectual understanding; then of seeing and feeling the truth and lastly of being and becoming truth, which meant perfection. I felt that I had not reached the latter state yet. Words are of the intellect, said the Master. The help he would give me would be an entirely internal one, by his very presence in my heart. Afterwards I realized why the Avatars themselves never commit their teachings to dead paper, in dead letters, but leave this to their disciples to do.

When the Master told me that one day I would realize him as the Divine Mother Herself, I was somewhat puzzled. Afterwards, when the Self revealed Itself to the self as the Self of all, I realized the truth of it. The true meaning of another saying of the Master, viz., that he had always been with me, was always with me and would always be with me till Eternity, also became self-evident to me after that revelation.

Realizing later on one of the Master's divine aspects, the truth of that saying of Shri Ramakrishna a few days before entering Maha Samadhi, viz., I am seeing through millions of eyes and hearing through millions of ears, I am speaking and eating through millions of mouths and working through millions of hands, came home to me so forcibly. The Master had told me that gradually I would realize him completely in all his divine aspects — aspects of that real Self, the one without a second.