apprehended) communion with Upasni Maharaj, at the end of seven years of the spiritual ‘coming down' journey from God to man, looked so very different from what he looked during the subsequent periods of the changing phases of his inner work, spread over four decades, that I could have hardly believed at that time what the future change would be like. Apart from the physical change, the inner change caused by inner work, revealed in his outward activity and adoption of a particular way of life for himself and in concern with others individually and collectively, was of more ocular significance.

He was fair, but looked tanned under the immediate force of having to contain the fire of absoluteness of God in the limitedness of human body. His nature was sharp, quick, forthright and vibrant. His eyes were penetrating and aglow with divine fire. His body was lean and wiry but strong and active. There was an air of deep drunkenness of spirit — the intoxication which was ever conscious and flashed out in the lightning words of knowledge and wisdom and acts of a deep, affectionate and tender love. The selflessness that pervaded his doings and words was simple and unsophisticated. Inwardly, he seemed to live in God as God for God's work and outwardly lived as man for all men except for himself. His inner work, as we call it, had just begun to appear. It was the Avataric work which none can fathom and few can imagine. I was hardly aware of such a thing; until some months later, the repeated symptoms revealed in his outward movements became so obvious that there was nothing else to relate, except an immensely purposeful burning of a volcanic motive inside occasionally throwing out variegated colors of altruistic temper and turmoil. This is not what a casual observer can or is expected to grasp. The gravity or the authenticity of experience is likely to go over his head, unless he is either a patient observer, a true seeker, or the one whose fortune gets him into the orbit of Meher Baba's love or work.

It is like a deafening noise and unrest that accompanies the working of a huge machinery that proves its worth by turning out material of great human benefit, when its clangs and its cataclysmic noises are made to be absorbed by a most delicate instrument with utmost sensitivity like a human brain or mind. What of the noise created by the entire creation of God, of which one is fully conscious and purposefully exposed to its sight and sound — the creation filled with innumerable heavenly bodies in its dinning, whirling, spinning sound with its earth, water, air and fire going round and round and its ever-buzzing life of birth, death and sustenance? This experience that seems to have originated during the coming-down journey of Meher Baba's contact with Upasni Maharaj and which gradually settled down during the post-contact period, should have given way to his assumption of the full charge of his Avataric work by himself.

Small Dream

In my growing contact with Meher Baba, I felt all the time I was getting nearer to him, or rather he was coming nearer to me, occupying most of my spare moments by day with his thoughts and his love. During nights there was a constant feeling of him at heart, proved by the fact that whenever I was partially or fully awake, the thought of him came first accompanied by a longing to go and stay near him.

This reminds me of a dream which I had, though of a hazy background, but so impressive as to remain in memory as fresh as I saw it in 1922. It was Sadashiv Patel's house or the adjoining house in Kasba Peth, where on the terrace, I saw Baba moving about for a while and I following him in my vision and in the thought of my love for him.

Romance and its Severance

During my college life, I could not escape a romantic encounter with a girl of my