and that Meher Baba is the One and Only Personification of the One God in this age.

So I went around India with my companions muttering, "I see this, I do not see that—I see—I do not see," and thinking, "The sunlight hurts my eyes as the Light of Baba burns ever more deeply into my heart." As I stepped into Baba's tomb, the one built by Him many years ago, what did I feel? I felt the darkness against my eyes like a terrible pressure, the pressure of not seeing Baba face to face, the disappointment of not now, not here. Oh God, how will I see your face as it really is? I, the painter, who has burnt up his eyes searching for sight of Your true face. God—Baba, You know that I have tried to see You, where have I missed You? Where am I to find You now that You have taken from me even Your illusory shadow form with which my heart up to now was consoled? I stumble into this tomb of God to find only the dust of my own feet from my own tired journeying, dust mingled with the dust that covers what I thought was You, my beloved.

Now I will paint dust itself. But alas; painting, in fact, is dust, dust made into the liquid hues which flow from the brush, struggling to make and remake Your face. You are pleased with me because I admit my blindness, my inability to see the Real. I have given you my blindness and my sight. And You have balanced them on the scales of Your sublime Law which is Love. You are God and You have brought me to Your tomb which is the end of all illusion, and the beginning of what is true.

Sweet Avatar, Lord of Creation, welling up in universes to know Yourself for ever and ever, are You the unseen or am I the unseen? Who created this unseeing if not You? Once I sat before You bathed in the joy that was a fraction of Your bliss. But You assured me from the heaven of Your smiling eyes, "I am not this body; I am Avatar," which means the Active Principle of conscious God manifest in man. It is necessary to believe that this Active Principle, the Avataric Office continues to function whether or not, it has a visible corporeal counterpart on Earth. It is this Avatar that I am concerned with, and attracted to as a personal being.

Of God Beyond, I know nothing at all. Avatar Meher Baba is all I can know. Of God Beyond in His formless inactive and Self-satisfied state I can know less than nothing, in fact, I shrink back as if in terror of Him. The Divine Beloved, Meher Baba, is all I can know. No amount of dust can ever bury this Beloved. Nor soil the daaman of His Truth. And no amount of darkness and despair can shade these poor eyes from the radiance that is Baba. Once You were a little boy playing as other children play the games of illusion. Yet even then You were God's Chosen One, One chosen to declare in the gestures of silence the certainty of God's Own Existence.

The tomb was dark to my eyes but not as dark as I thought it would be. And a picture of the Beloved began to swing back and forth, to and fro in the wind, and I watched it for a long time. Baba was saying something to me. The dust covering Baba was covered with a beautiful cloth and that cloth was completely covered with fresh fragrant roses, perfuming the air. And Baba said to me as I watched His picture inexplicably swinging back and forth and with that unmistakable Avataric humor, "Be of good cheer, for I am not here."

So I got up from where I was seated near Baba's head and went out of the tomb which Baba Himself long ago had built for this day. When He built it atop this hill of Meherabad, He was proclaiming to the world that though I am divinely perfect and all powerful, eternal and imperishable, I am also mortal, tender, and frail like all men, and in the end will succumb as all men succumb by dropping my corporeal body. Standing there on the chest of the universe, on that dusty hilltop, I was at God 's country carnival and Baba, no longer a man, had become a happening. God was the sun welding all into One. Never have I seen such sunlight as was now at this Meherabad noon. Baba said India is closest to the Om-point of any place in the universe. Where is Om-point if not at God-Man's tomb? Surely He had made of this very ground His Om-point of His Infinite Existence. Here He brought down His Om-Point all the way to Earth plane—God to Dust to God—and capped it