I walked to him and he reached up and pulled me down in an embrace that is forever. I experienced his hug as the essence of intimacy. At the same time, his embrace was perfectly impersonal. For a few seconds, I was simply in another world, in a tranquil pink and blue cloud, in a sky far, far higher than words can convey. Although only a faint glimmer then, but now a fuller intensity, I experienced something coming from Baba that was precisely what I had felt as a child sitting on that street curb in San Diego, realizing my father had come home from the war in the South Pacific. It was overwhelming radiance and the fullness of love. For one eternal moment, which grows richer with each passing year, I was at home with my real father, Avatar Meher Baba.1
Meanwhile, back in America, in the town of Hampton, Virginia, Henry Kashouty's wife, Kecha, was pregnant and had not been able to travel to India. Baba rubbed his tummy when he met Henry and asked about her.2
After Baba embraced each one individually, someone asked about habits and becoming a slave to them, to which Baba replied, "If you become addicted to God, then all your problems are solved. Go on drinking the divine Wine of love until you become one with God. It is good to be addicted to the love of God."
Interpreting Baba's gestures, Eruch said, "Baba says he is infinitely tired, with the whole world on his head. He has had to undergo all kinds of suffering within these four or five days. One danger has been averted [the Cuban situation], but two more are facing him [China and India]."
Baba continued:
One who knows what love is, enters deeper and deeper within , and finds that he has four journeys to make there. These journeys within have no space, yet it is an infinite process.
Only Jesus Christ knew what Baba knows: how to suffer. No one is more eager than I to break my silence. As soon as I break it, everything will go easily.
God is so close to each of you, closer than the very breath of your life. You have to renounce everything, including your self; then you will realize Baba fully. God is beyond religion, beyond love. When you begin to love God intensely, then you will know what real separation is. When you have the gift of love, you love your Real Self. The false self then becomes the lover of the Real Self. There is nothing but God.
Footnotes
- 1.Gary Mullins, Dancing The Beguine (Xlibris, 2000).
- 2.In February 1963, a son was born to the Kashoutys on Baba's birth date, and they named him Merwan.