When I walked in to see Baba, I came with a great deal of apprehension and anxiety. Baba had said he would show me his face as it really is. I had no idea what that meant, but it ticked off a tremendous apprehension in my mind over a period of time before seeing him. And when I came into the room, I was tremendously relieved to see a little man sitting in a chair. I thought, my gosh, this is a real human being sitting here. I just had never imagined it.
Baba embraced and kissed me on both cheeks. Before he embraced me he had me take my glasses off, and hand them to Eruch. Baba held my face between his cool hands. It was a face flushed with the fever of anticipation. Those cool hands soothed my fever as Baba looked into my eyes with his face just inches away from my face. At that moment nothing else in the universe existed. In that moment one tiny little atma [soul] came face to face with Paramatma [the Oversoul] — and the atma miraculously was not destroyed.
To embrace Baba is to embrace the ether itself. He kissed me on both cheeks and I lay my suffering at his feet, and in the twinkling of his eye I was at peace and at home on the carpet of my father's house, stunned into happiness. Everything had stopped when Baba embraced me and held my face in front of his and looked into my eyes. The first thing Baba said was: "Can you see my face?" (How he said this with hand gestures I don't know, because his hands felt as if they were on my face all the while.)
I felt as if he went inside me, all the way back to the very roots of my eyesight and turned around and took a look at himself through my eyes. I replied in a whisper: "Not very well, Baba." In my reply there was something apologetic, something of disappointment in not being able to give Baba the happiness of my seeing his face. I think this disappointment, shared by Baba and me, was the closest point that I have ever come to the point of real surrender, for looking back now, I see that at that moment I realized that I had no real hope and that I was completely and utterly helpless in the hands of God.
