Heartfelt outbursts of Baba's Jai filled the air and a wild exhilaration pervaded. Bhajan singing commenced, and people forgot the world and their troubles in the intoxication of the Beloved's smile. Afterwards, Baba and the mandali ate lunch and were then escorted to Meher Spiritual Center at Saoner. Harkare, with tears in his eyes, performed Baba's arti, and Pophali's family had Baba's darshan. Baba here gave a message, "The Unquenching Fire of Spiritual Longing , " which Harkare read out, followed by Gadekar's Marathi translation. The following is a portion of the message:
The life of desires is always and necessarily constrained to an unending oscillation between the opposites of joy and suffering, gratification and disappointment, good and evil. But in the very midst of the tumultuous pains and pleasures of ego-life there dawns, in the ripeness of experience and through the grace of the Master, the clear perception of the utter futility of desires that seek fulfillment through the false and the transient forms of life.
This is the beginning of the life of spiritual longing, accompanied by constant discrimination between the true and the false. When the spiritual longing is thus awakened, it can never be entirely set at rest or evaded. It becomes an unquenching fire that burns the very roots of limiting desires. Thus shall the pilgrim arrive at his abode of peace through keen spiritual longing.
Baba then proceeded to the open grounds opposite the municipal high school, where a gigantic pandal had been erected. But it was not large enough for the thousands of people who had collected. The crowd was so vast that it became difficult to control.
Jal Kerawalla read out Baba's message, "The Divine Heritage of Man , " and Harkare Pleader repeated it in Marathi:
In all climes and in all places, man is constantly striving for happiness; but there are very few who have it, because there are very few who truly know the secret of happiness.
Man is constantly feeling thwarted and limited, and he is ever in the clutches of unrelieved agony or suffering because, not knowing his own true nature, he identifies himself with the body or the desires or the limited individual mind, and thereby becomes a victim to their respective limitations and sufferings. It is only by knowing himself to be different from and beyond all these that he can freely enter the divine heritage of abiding happiness, which is inalienable from his being as God.