Only two days after the coming home to Baba's feet and feeling bathed in his pure love, I found myself incredibly plunged into a nightmare of doubts and anxieties that to some extent could be even called a faith crisis. As I look back upon this after returning to the U.S. and getting some perspective on the events, I can see what an amazing vortex of positive and negative energies we had passed through. I was interested in someone's comment that the darshan is for work on the ego. For me, how true!

The darshan is composed of intense energies, and any negatively perceived event can tip the scales and throw all of these energies in the direction of pain and anxiety. Such an event could be a reaction to one of the members of the darshan group—something that one of them says or does that seems unfeeling or rejecting. Perhaps it is even some disconcerting statement on the part of one of the Mandali, or the aspects of the darshan week that seem like the start of a new religion, or the continued shouting of "Avatar Meher Baba Ki Jai," or what appeared to be a commercialism building up around Baba, or any other happening that jars the mind or brings up buried attitudes or expectations.

So there were two sides of the darshan, as I have noted at the beginning, which is usually the case with experience in duality. I only began to remember this after a few days of being caught up in a web of concerns, agitated thinking, and other conceptual entrapments. It was not until the last day of darshan that I again clearly felt Baba's definite and reassuring touch, not with ecstasy this time, but with just enough of a comforting inner embrace. It was peace again. The plane ride back, all 24 hours of it, was a joy.

The question of the breaking of the silence is one that is of concern to most Westerners. The Mandali themselves are not very interested in the issue. Baba's loving presence was all of the manifestation that they need. When pressed to give an opinion on the matter, some tend to think that Baba has already broken his silence, with the result of the release of The Word to become more evident in time.

For myself, living in the midst of the uncertain and violent flailing of the western world, it seems that something more sudden and dramatic is going to be required for mankind to change from its present disaster course. Perhaps these different points of view will be reconciled as the divine drama unfolds for all of us.

Baba's brother Behram and his twin sons, Rustom and Sohrab, each had a remarkably similar dream one night during the darshan week. In each case, as I recall it, they dreamed that they were near or in Baba 's Tomb, crying and unhappy, and Baba came to them and asked why. In one twin's dream he said to Baba that he was unhappy because Baba had told Mehera that she would go before Him and instead He passed away first. Baba answered something to the effect that He had work to do elsewhere and had to leave, and that if he told Mehera this she would have been unhappy both before His physical departure as well as afterwards. This way He had saved her the grief beforehand. In the other twin's dream he asked Baba why he did not break his silence before he died. Baba answered that he did, but that no one has heard it yet. The twin then asked about the physical destruction that was supposed to occur when he broke his silence. Baba said that there would be destruction. I am not sure what Behram said to Baba, but in his dream Baba assured him that everything was all right and Behram felt relieved.

Several Easterners, some from as far away as Karachi, West Pakistan, served as volunteers to aid us in our stay there and were wonderful companions and guides throughout the darshan week. I was strongly impressed with the flowing together of East and West that Baba is bringing about, and how unified we all are in Him. Once during the week Eruch used the term confluence to describe it; and I was rather startled by his use of this word. I had been involved in a Meher Baba program at the Hemisfair in Texas during the summer of '68 and the theme of the fair had been Confluence Cosmos. This could well be the theme of the darshan, in its present and its eternal meaning.

D. H. Lawrence wrote a well-known short story about Christ—The Man Who Died.