pletely human. I know this because He told me so when I was with Him in 1965. He told me when we were discussing shaving.

Baba says in God Speaks that there are always the perfect ones, and there are the most perfect ones, and there is the Supremely Perfect One which is Himself. He is the Supremely Perfect One because He is the only One who ever becomes a supremely ordinary human being.

It is this supremely ordinary human being, full of everything sweet and lovely and perfectly sublime, that we must come to know and love and give ourselves up to.

And this is what painting means, really: to see Baba stooping down to show the most extraordinary thing that ever happens when God becomes an ordinary man. What else could He have shown to the eyes of a painter but the face of a man? No artist will ever paint the face of God, except God Himself when He paints it in the state of Fana-Fillah for the eyes of the Majzoob alone when He is drowned in the Reality of the Beloved.

Before I went to India this last time, I still had some lingering hope of glimpsing some spark of the Divine which would transport me into the heights of vision. Now I have given it up. Now I am resigned to face squarely my Beloved as the One who for the sake of all has crushed Himself down into the finite and helpless form of an ordinary man.

Beloved Baba, I bow down to You in my paintings. You have brought me face to face with You, and in so doing You took away from me the art of painting and gave it back. I stand now at the delta of a mighty river that was once the great tradition of western painting flowing down through the centuries. It is all over. Now there is only the ocean, and that ocean is Your shining face.

Alas, it is all too vast. How secure the raging stream by comparison to that Ocean! Before these eyes spreads the shorelessness of Your Face, and my task is Oceanic.

PART V. THE HELPLESSNESS AND HOPELESSNESS

"About what you hear from the Master, never say it is wrong, because my dear, the fault lies in your own incapacity to understand Him. Whatever my Master does is of the highest benefit to all concerned."

Mastery of painting is not for me; I leave that to the Master; mastery of writing is not for me; I leave that to my Master. Mastery of anything is not for me, but is held safely for all concerned in the hands of my Master, Meher Baba, who is eternally the Master. My hope is merely to help my Master to accomplish in me His Will; my only help is hope in my Master. This is helplessness and hopelessness; it is the New Life in its stark reality. It is an awesome thing, this New Life of helplessness and hopelessness, and its one good fortune is in seeing the humor of it all, that Divine Humor smiling there in every situation.

For example, when we were staying as guests at Meherabad, my companions and I had reached that point which almost all westerners reach sooner or later, that point of being fed up with the eastern cooking, even when that cooking is so lovingly toned down by those Baba-loving cooks who have come to appreciate compassionately the gastro-sensitivity of the western digestive system. The point is reached when every American, no matter how constitutionally rugged and adaptable he may be, longs for a simple hot dog or something like that, even though he may rarely eat things like hot dogs in America.