stayed with Him at Meherazad and He agreed to take our Sufi order under His wing.

Here I would like to try to correct a false impression. Many people attending the Sahavas in this country, and other seekers, become confused because some of Baba's followers are Sufis and some are not. Baba is not a Sufi, He is THE SUFI, even as Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad had the Wisdom—the REAL knowledge. People from all religions, cults and sects come to Him for His divine guidance. He dictated the following words at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on June 17th, 1952:

"Meher Baba is equally connected with Islam and its Sufism, Christianity and its Mysticism, the Orient and its Vedantism, broad Buddhism, practical Zoroastrianism, Jainism and many other such isms which all speak the same divine Truth and lead to the same divine goal. Meher Baba is also detached and above all these divine paths. He has to awaken the followers of these paths to the real meaning of these isms in their true spirit by reorienting these isms, and in this capacity He has reoriented Sufism in the charter to be universally adopted."

Hazrat Inayat Khan said, "A book is a dead teacher." In his book “In An Eastern Rose Garden" (page 307) he also said:

"Whatever the name of the teacher, there is still the one stem of life and light. As long as the tree of this manifestation exists, the stem will exist. The names are all names of one current of life and light that runs through the tree. The One Spirit of life is given different names, the sacred names; and we more easily recognize the current by the particular name to which we are accustomed. So far we are right, but the mistake we make―and it is to our loss―is to ignore or deny the same truth because it is given to us in another form and in another name. We limit it. We say the truth was only in that period when such and such teachers came . . . But the Spirit of illumination can never stop as long as life goes on. Illumination has been continued from the first to the last, and will always be continued until the manifestation stops."

Despite these words and those of such great souls as Rumi, Kabir, etc., all of whom exhort us to find a living teacher because Sufistic training is based on the light of a living master, some people, due to their attachment to a personality, cannot bring themselves to seek another. All Sufis believe in a Qutub and they know that in the present cyclic time the Avatar or