A BIRTHDAY REMEMBRANCE, 1954

LTHOUGH BABA is just completing his 59th year, there is so much about him that is timeless, that it is difficult for us to think of him in terms of age. The Great Being behind that face and form we know and love so dearly is, as we are sure, not measurable by the passage of time, but is as immortal as the Divine Love with which we identify him. In celebrating Baba's Birthday, therefore, we are really celebrating the return to earth of Love Divine in the form of a man we can see, love and with whom we can communicate. A Being who has, ages since, completed the long evolutionary process of the Soul through numerous cycles of lives, from the original state of unconscious Divinity, to the final state of fully-realized God-hood. This is Baba, our Spiritual Master, Eternal Friend and Divine Beloved.

We have found in him the living Beauty of all our highest hopes, and we have experienced, through his Grace, a precious taste of the Divine Nectar which is, indeed, the true panacea for all the suffering, disillusionment and mayavic ignorance which, in one way or another, besets all humanity. And this Divine Nectar is the touch of the Master's boundless Compassion which has, somehow, in mysterious ways known only to him, found us in our far corners of the earth and awakened some measure of our slumbering consciousness from the darkened dreams of life, as seen through the distorted vision of our own selfhood.

Through Baba we have been touched by a Love too great for us to comprehend, much less ever to have deserved. We have come to him in various ways; sometimes groping, often wondering, but always with faith and longing; and he has taken us into his Infinite Heart where we have found the secret Highway to God.

We have discovered that Baba works through the very fabric of our prosaic, everyday lives to reveal an ever greater measure of the Spiritual Splendour of his True Being, and, through inwardly drawing closer to the Unveiled Reality we discern in him, we find that the Way has become clearer, easier and more sure; that the once remote possibility of actually experiencing God has now become a vibrant promise which, even in this lifetime, may be fulfilled.

As the Messianic Avatar of the Ages, Baba again comes forth to succor the great need of the immortal spirit of man. As such, he leads the way