Baba's mandali were beside him. From the right, certain of the faithful came in from time to time. Darwin Shaw was there and brought me to Baba. To my eyes, there was light around him. I took out the fragment of quartz Darwin had brought me from India, which Baba had held in his hands and which I worshipfully carried, as always, in my handbag and asked that Baba should once again charge the little sparkling stone. Baba smiled and took the stone in both hands, pressing his fingers together over it, and then gave it back to me. I felt his blessing and the lift of consciousness to a point where my body could scarcely bear the tension.
Out in the anteroom, people spoke about him with hushed voices. There were the old, the mature, the young, white, black and brown. There were small children. Those that had appointments were waiting for their interviews. Others who did not have appointments were eagerly picking up scraps of information about Baba. The members of the committee, at the table by the door, were continuously busy directing the line of visitors; others who had been with Baba many years moved in and out like ministers of grace, guiding and helping those that were finding him in the flesh for the first time.
Men and women stood in the hall outside the audience room all day, waiting for a glimpse of Baba when he walked to the elevator to go to his private rooms on an upper floor. There was no sign of fatigue on their faces, only expressions of great joy and gratitude for even a glimpse of the Beloved. Even during his brief progress to the elevator, Baba seemed to be gathering the joys, the sorrows, the aspirations of each and every one and charging them with the benediction of his love. One woman, a stranger, said, "You have never loved until you found Baba." I agreed. All the loves of our human lives are but tiny blades of grass under the towering tree of his Divine Love.
Filis Frederick: "As always, Baba's whole attention was focused on the individual before him, and it never flagged or wearied in spite of the hundreds who passed; the last were greeted as warmly as the first."
Henry David Kashouty, 33, was a lawyer from Virginia who had been looking all his life "for the kind of answer that would be able to hold up no matter what happened in life." He had read widely, but in 1955, as he wrote to Swami Nikhilananda (a disciple of Ramakrishna of Calcutta) in New York, "I am growing tired of reading of the Reality I am now convinced exists.1 I want to meet someone who has experienced that Reality."
Footnotes
- 1.Nikhilananda had been told of Baba in 1934 by Norina when they were both passengers on a ship from New York to Paris.