with His lovely Dome. Here was Om-Point all right, but the Baba I know had gone elsewhere, for He can never be pinned down, not even at Om-Point.

In India, I could see nothing but the shadows of God's children going back and forth in their daily round. Once in a while bells would beckon my sight to a passing bullock cart and remind me of ages and ages of nothingness passing into nothing. That is time. God comes down as Avatar every seven hundred to fourteen hundred years. That is all I know of time.

I could say that in India I was conscious of God and conscious of dust. Dust was everywhere just as God is everywhere. This dust everywhere reminded me that to become what we really are, we must become as dust; and that to become as dust we must be burnt dry as dust by Divine Love. The dry air parched my throat and the dust made it sore and inflamed, each day a little more. Until on my last day in India my voice was gone, dried up in the Silence of Silence. It was alright because there was nothing to say.

Bombay is not dusty but humid; Poona is dry but not too dusty; but Ahmednagar with Meherabad on one side and Meherazad on the other was at this season completely dry and completely dusty. Is it true that Baba once said that He stayed in the dry dustland because Mohammed was stoned to death in the desert? Because of the mind the ways of God are made unfathomable, but because of the heart God can ultimately be known.

We rumbled over the dusty road from Meherabad through Ahmednagar to Meherazad. The temperature was 115 degrees of dust and as we passed through Ahmednagar I thought this dust is so hot because it belongs to the Avatar. It is Baba's dust and Baba's dust is hot dust. Baba says, "Don't get too close to me because you are liable to get burned."

As we rumbled over the dusty road to Meherazad, a road that I had already travelled once before, I felt one with the dust and was happy, for Meherazad was where I met my Beloved and became forever His disciple. Yes, I was happy and my thoughts went on to consider who but God and His chosen ones would live in this desert? God is tricky, so tricky indeed that He can hardly figure Himself out. He cannot help laughing at all that He Himself has done and at all that He just might do. He is the laughing Buddha, and yet His heart breaks for all of His children to come back to Him. Mighty are the prophets of all ages who are close to finding reunion with Him. But they are tiny children at the feet of the Prophet of Prophets, who is the one Baba. All must return to Baba sooner or later.

I was very happy as we passed through the gate of Baba's abode, the abode of Love that is all-knowing. And we passed between rows of Gulmohr trees, the branches of which brushed against the sides of the bus, and Baba tossed a leaf from one of them through the window of the bus into my lap. I picked it up to smell it. It had a freshness of fragrance somewhat like pine. I put it into my shirt pocket. Baba has said, "Not a leaf moves but by the will of God." Thus the moving of a leaf should be sign enough to me that God alone exists.

I went into Mandali Hall where I had bowed down to His feet and I felt the unmistakable peace and exaltation of His Presence. This peace and exaltation was concentrated near Baba's chair where I had sat joyously at Baba 's feet when He had caressed my face and sent loving glances into my heart. It was just as it had been when I had come the first time. Nothing had changed. There was Baba enveloping me, taking me to His heart, making me feel courageous and proud and at ease. I felt this is my very own room. I looked around and the room was entirely different than I had remembered. Yet Baba 's sweet Presence remained here just as it was. I felt Him less at the far end of the hall than I did when I came near to His chair. It is a sacred thing to be in the Avataric Presence. In this Presence the question of a physical body is irrelevant. Baba gives each of us as much Presence as we are able to receive. To give more would be less than His Compassion. For His bliss could be our agony.

It was three years before that I had sat here at the feet of the Master. The Master continually sent His glance darting about the room, and now and then He snapped His fingers for keener attention. When I sat at the Master's feet; Baba gave