Within a few minutes after giving a grave warning to all present to pay serious attention to what he was going to tell them, he would make all burst out in a roar of laughter. It was child's play for Baba to make the least sentimental man in a group begin to struggle with tears in his eyes and start stuttering incoherently.
With all that, Baba repeated the same topics and subjects before every group, every week, without ever missing a single important point; but he always did so in a different way, in different words, in different contexts. Words such as "love," "obedience" and "surrender" were explained by Baba to the point of making them cease to be words. He made them sound like live things: things as having been lived, as could be and should be lived. He would explain things and, in the same breath, add that they were inexplicable.
Another noteworthy feature of the sahavas lay in the fact that eventually, in effect, it proved to be Baba's sahavas for all his life and as such, enough to last for the lifetime of each of the participants. Although each group had only five days to live their life in Baba's company, Baba managed to give them every idea of his life from childhood to his present Mastery in Servitude and right up to the time he would breathe his last ... Baba made everyone as familiar with himself as those who had been living with him all their lives.
By a few or by the many, among the rich and poor, old and young, strong and healthy, weak and ailing, literate and illiterate, educators and intellectuals, businessmen, government [civil] servants, lawyers, doctors, artisans, artists, poets, writers, sanyasis [renunciants], tapasvis [ascetics], Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, Sikhs and Christians who attended the weekly congregations, the participants on the whole represented mankind in miniature.
The sahavas in spirit was a wonderful sangam [coming together] of naked Divinity with stark humanity. It was a hujum [crowd] and a mela [fair] of the Infinite mingling with finitude. "Weaknesses" had their moments of being drowned in the "Strength" which produced the one miracle of God, the whole of creation. All sins and virtues were, for the time being, shamed into nothingness ... There were moments when one could almost feel that, as the Infinite Ocean of existence, God did link every life into one indivisible whole.
