you you would have become ash—and not as ash is your date with the Beloved, but as a song without selfness, a smokeless flame of his flame singing his eternal belovedness.

So he kept you shielded from destruction and shone in you only as your love and your longing; and by these he lit your way and gave you inexhaustible energy to pursue it. So you were able to break out of stone binding and plant and worm and fish and bird and animal bindings and become a human being—image of his Imagelessness. And his light shining as your love and longing has now brought you to knowledge of him; and there is nowhere further for you to go and nothing more for you to do except array yourselves in the jewels of dust and await his knock on your door. And the inexhaustible energy which drove you on and up and across the kingdoms of evolution will enable you to endure the waiting.

This is my telling you about the Beloved, beloved God-Man Meher Baba. Others can give you the honey of occasions when he said this, when he did that: of the time when his stride reflected his unconquerableness, when his voice charmed every listener, when his glances were as terrible as lightnings and his smile as tender as a spring sun. They can tell you of the Great Mast Journeys, the journeys with a few chosen disciples to find the mad-after-God and the lost-in-God to realign their sights on him the eternal, ancient, shining Beloved, and how he kept his God-manness covered and had the disciples refer to him only as their elder brother; and how he pursued the poor who are proud and do not accept charity, and devised ways of helping them without their knowing who had helped.

But I came late and have no honey-hoard of stories of the early and middle years. And the general occasions and incidents of the last years, the years of my stay with him, have escaped me—as though the Beloved had punched the bucket of my memory full of holes; and all the personal occasions of that stay have resolved themselves into one continuous occasion of his unbounded love, immense patience and unutterable loving-kindness. From the cream of separate occasions the divine Churner has extracted the butter of unending occurrence. That beloved Baba allowed me to sit at his feet for ten years is alone proof that his love and patience are infinite. And as for his kindness, he would allow me to see that much of his God-manness and that much of my not-manhood that I could not bear the burden of it another moment; and then he would press my hand, and the pressure said, Bear, bear and yet bear—causing tears, God knows from where, to run out of my stone eyes.

This is the Beloved I know and am telling you about. His real life story has not yet been told, and never will be—for his message is in his love which is unfathomable, and his life was according to our need which is bound up with the whole sweep of the creation which was contained in his First Question, Who am I? which the sun-stars tumbling out of God's mouth were the first syllables of answer.

The real story of the Beloved is in our response each time to his call. It is all the stories of individual lovers, which have no completion until the lover merges with the Beloved forever—and then can never be told.

The Beloved is who he is; and even the perfect saints who see nothing but him do not know fully what that is. Whatever has been said about him by lovers all through the ages was nothing but his own Self-song limited by the notation of form; and whatever will be said by lovers to come will be the same thing. Nothing new is possible; yet in every lover the song is entirely new, for the Ancient One is born every moment from his original breath on which the universes of stars and the seed-image of Man floated like the banners of a beautiful army.

How incalculable is the past and how immeasurable is the future and how immense is now—this living moment of the Beloved 's name. If we do not carry that Name on our breath, of what use is it to breathe? Everything in nature breathes in its present self-state towards its next stage. Rock breathes towards plant, plant towards worm, worm towards fish, fish towards bird, bird towards animal and animal towards Man. If we breathe only to sustain our daily lives of work and leisure we are less than animals.

The real story of Meher Baba is in his Name which he has put into our hearts to love and breathe and sing wherever we are