Gulmai kept silence until the morning of the 11th, when Adi drove her to Meherazad and she broke it and her fast in Baba's presence. She was later given a 40-day period of special dietary instructions that included drinking water in which she had dipped Baba's locket.
On Monday, 15 July, Eruch's mother Gaimai and her sister, Banumasi, arrived from Poona to see Baba. They met with him at 3:30 P.M. in the presence of Eruch and Adi. During the conversation, Baba remarked:
Jesus had a Judas who betrayed him. During the lives of all previous Avatars, there was a Judas. This is what has been ordained.
God incarnated as [Meher] Baba, as the Avatar, at the most crucial time which is the end of the cycle, and as such, being the last Avatar of the cycle, Baba will have twelve Judases. Primarily, there will be one Judas who will be a Parsi, and the other eleven will be his colleagues in the act of betrayal. The eleven Judases will consist of Parsis and others, among whom will be two Parsi women.
Gaimai and Banumasi returned to Poona the same day.
During July 1957, Baba answered several questions for Irene Conybeare and dictated three discourses for her book, In Quest Of Truth : one on "Maya," another on "Compassion" and a third titled "The Aura and the Halo."1 Part of Baba's discourse, explaining the difference between an aura and a halo, is as follows:
The aura and the halo are two different things, and people are unable to distinguish between the two. Like their respective shadows, every man, woman, child and baby has an aura, but only a very few individuals have a halo in any of the varying phases of its development, and still fewer possess a full halo. An aura is the reflection of the emotions of an individual mind, just as any physical thing possesses its shadow on the physical plane. The halo begins to appear when the aura begins to disappear.
An aura is the mental reflection of the aggregate impressions of thoughts and actions gathered by and stored in an individual mind. Every individual aura is the image of a circle of seven colors and each aura differs from the other in proportion to the amount of each of the seven colors, according to the individual's prominent impressions.
Footnotes
- 1.In Quest Of Truth took several years to write and was not published until 1962.