Baba emerged very happy over the successful contact with this highly advanced mast, and related to the mandali:
If I really like anything, I like two things: masts and children. I like masts for their strength, and children for their helplessness. The fire of love is very, very painful, and masts present a challenge to God, the Beloved. It is a perpetual tug-of-war between the lover and the Beloved.
Ghani asked, "Why do so many masts choose dirty and unsanitary surroundings? And how is it that their health is not affected?"
Dictating on the board, Baba answered:
The masts, as I said, because of the terrible fire of their love, present a challenge to the Beloved, and this challenge — that the Beloved should manifest Himself — is always accompanied by heroic efforts to achieve total self-elimination or egolessness, efforts that may take many forms. To live in dirty surroundings, such as in or near a latrine or a urinal or a dustbin, is one way of utterly forgetting the bodily existence. And the beauty of it is that, when the body is utterly neglected or forgotten, due to being steeped in love for the Divine Beloved, the body does not deteriorate but takes care of itself automatically. The minds of ordinary people are constantly busy looking after their bodies, but they find that, in spite of taking every kind of precaution and care, deterioration can never be avoided altogether. Kabir has said:
Discard the body, it remains.
Preserve the body, it goes.
And so the astonishing fact emerges
That the corpse eats up death. [Corpse meaning the uncared-for body.]
It is not given to everybody to be a lover of God. Such lovers are so consumed in the fire of love that they are not conscious of their stage of spiritual progress, and they do not have any thought of union with God. They simply "enjoy" the pain and torture of love, and long for more and more of it. These lovers do not have any thoughts about their separation from the Beloved, or, as I said, any thoughts of union with Him. They are perfectly resigned to the state in which they find themselves, and when their resignation reaches its climax, it is the Beloved Who seeks union with them.