Baba asked.
"Words can't explain it. I would like to go back to India with you. I've heard much about retreats in the Himalayas and elsewhere, and even dreamt about them."
Baba asked, "What is your desire in life?"
"To create an art [form], quite different from what is prevalent today. It will be new, novel, and natural."
Baba encouraged her, "Yes, you will inspire others to dance with joy. It will be full of divine inspiration, through your love. Do you also act?"
Even at that young age, Eileen had already appeared professionally in a play the year before. She replied, "I did, but I don't want to [anymore] till I am perfect."1
Florence Lee also met Baba on the 17 th . Florence gave regular public talks in New York on spiritual topics, billing herself as an "Instructor of The Illumined Message."
Elizabeth Chapin Patterson, 35, was married to a prominent New York stockbroker named Kenneth Askew Patterson, and she herself was a successful insurance executive. A person of considerable means, she had traveled all over the world, including India and a venture to the North Pole.
Elizabeth had been religiously minded since childhood and was a customer of Malcolm and Jean's bookstore. She first heard about Meher Baba in a letter from Jean. On the morning of 17 November 1931, Jean telephoned Elizabeth to inform her that Baba had arrived and to invite her to meet him. "Meher Baba wants to see you," she said. Jean gave her directions to Harmon and Elizabeth drove there that same day with a friend named Schatz Adams Weicker, with whom she had made previous lunch plans.2
After a vegetarian lunch at Harmon, each was taken separately upstairs to meet Baba. Meredith led Elizabeth into Baba's room. Elizabeth described her first meeting with her Master:
Immediately my feeling was one of recognition. All the way to the far end of the room where he was seated, I tried to recall where I had seen him before. The feeling was one of familiarity, like meeting a friend in a foreign land — a friend whom one has known well since childhood, only since that earlier period the appearance has changed.
Still in the process of recalling, I walked over to where Baba was seated, with sandaled feet folded in front of him and the sun shining on his beautiful hair. His remarkable eyes reminded me of a Persian print, but they were so alive with a thousand dancing fires in them that I realized I had never seen anyone like Baba before. Nowhere in my world travels had I seen his likeness, nor did he seem to fit into any nationality.
Footnotes
- 1.Eileen Burns became a theater and radio personality.
- 2.Schatz Weicker was from a wealthy San Francisco family. Her grandfather, Edson Adams, was one of the founders of the city of Oakland. Her husband, Theodore Weicker Jr., was a prominent Wall Street broker, whose father was one of the founders of E. R. Squibb drug company.