and this is a beautiful thing. We don't have to climb up to some high platform to get to him. We just stay where we are, just be ourselves, just love him. This is a beautiful thing.

When I was in India in 1964 [sic], many times the thought crossed my mind, ‘There are so many thousands of people all over the world who have led a better life than I have, how does it happen that they are not here, but I am?' I didn't know the answer then, I still don't know the answer. It was Baba's doing and I felt deeply grateful to him. So, naturally, I thought, ‘What must I do?' The only thing one can do is to love him and try to surrender one's all to him. However, don't ever think that you just float around on cloud nine when you are with Baba. He sometimes throws you into a deeper inner working. He brings up things, makes you face them, do something about them. He pushes you into deeper levels of consciousness where you must work. So, I was trying to surrender everything I could. I finally reached a point where there was just a hard lump down there, deep within. There wasn't anything I could do about it. So I thought, ‘I guess that's it, I'll just have to live with it.' I was more or less reconciled to let it go at that. I had done all I could. I had no idea that Baba would do anything about it.. You know Baba doesn't have you go through any kind of a ceremony with him when he works with you, is helping you. He may not even look at you. No one else would know he is working with you, that he is doing anything for you or within you.

One day we were up on Meherabad hill, and I was perhaps ten feet away from Baba, and as I said, I had become quite reconciled to living with this hard lump deep within, when quite suddenly Baba turned on the force, some little bit, some little inkling of the fire of his Divine Love. Well, it swept through me as an irresistible wall, or flood, of blazing light, carrying everything in front of it. I knew then as I know now that nothing, but nothing, can stand in the way of his Divine Love when he releases it. This ‘lump' deep within was just swept away, and even when it was being swept away I realized that I was holding on, clinging to it, the thing I wanted to get rid of. But I couldn't hold it in the face of his love. He swept it away.

I felt greatly relieved, a great sense of inner freedom. It was like a living experience of the twenty-third Psalm. I could only say, "He restoreth my soul ". So great was Baba's love on that day that Jeanne, my wife, who was some 10 or 12 thousand miles away at home in Schenectady, N. Y., felt it. When I got back home, a few weeks later, she asked me, "What happened on the 24th of September - I felt Baba's love so strongly on that day?"

[sic] 1954 may be correct.