To quote her: "I saw Baba everywhere for a few days, everyone had His face and it seemed imprinted on the ground, in bushes, on doors, on walls, everywhere. When I meditated on the 'heart centre' it was Baba that I saw and the universe was full of nothing but Meher Baba! I was very blissful in those days, but I made the common mistake of telling people and they talked me out of it by saying it was imagination, etc. I guess it is hard for anyone to understand that there can be a bond that is not a physical one that can be reached through consciousness alone, and not through the usual physical senses of hearing, speaking, etc. It seemed quite reasonable and logical to me that anyone could contact mentally anyone he choses, anywhere, for where do time and space enter into consciousness?"

"Every time I have had a real broadening and lifting of consciousness there has not been any world of form: the universe disappears into Pure Being. You cannot tell me that God has to be something. I cannot even call mute consciousness by a name; it is always formless bliss, an ocean of bliss and love that simply fills all so-called space and permeates everything like water permeates a sponge."

"That is the closest I can describe the wonderful experience I had in 1947, but the universe was not there . . . I was only aware of this tremendous blissful being that was our real consciousness — I suppose the Krishna Self; I do not mean the personal self. It was all consciousness, and I individually was lost in it as was any other form. Only the tremendous bliss and love remained. I have had that wonderful state four times since then — once it lasted all night, and although of course I did not sleep, physically there was no fatigue and when I got back to physical consciousness again, I could go right ahead with my work without feeling the least bit tired. That is the consciousness that the Western schools and churches do not seem to know exists. That wonderful bliss that includes everything . . . but how can you call it God? For we are It and It is us! I think the most perfect description of It is in the Gita; 'I pervade all space with a fragment of Myself and I remain."

Once a man has experienced even a glimpse of the Infinite Spirit and the "Peace that passeth all understanding," he will have but one aim, to make such a state of illumination permanent. There is the story of Bhagwan Hamsa, in which he tells of his pilgrimage to see the Lord, i.e., to unite with his Divine Soul — or die. He climbed up to the frozen lake of Gaurikund twenty thousand feet above the sea; there he stayed for three nights and