yourself. He stirred something so deep inside me that I suddenly found myself weeping, for no apparent reason - weeping tears of joy, of ecstasy - but you will see, you will experience it yourself."

"He called for us both, together, shortly after you left for the market," she continued. "I told him that you had gone to make some necessary purchases for the household. He seemed distressed, at first, that you should have gone without having asked his permission. Then he had Chanji, his secretary, explain that when one is living with a perfect master, one doesn't do anything without first consulting him."

To a Westerner, accustomed to initiative and enterprise, this seemed, at the time, to be a strange and quite unnecessary stricture - yet it should have been clear, to me. When I realized, years afterward, what Baba meant to convey, I wondered that I could have been so dense! For years I had been trying to base my life on spiritual guidance, looking to God for direction in the unfoldment of my consciousness, the play of my energy, the conduct of my affairs - through meditation, through prayer, through silent communion, through intuitive perception. Baba was corroborating the virtue of this practice, was giving me a lesson in the validity of consecration as the basis of all thought and speech and action. If I was slow in understanding, it was because I had not realized, then, that he actually was a manifestation of God. But he knew - and that was why he had indicated that one was to come to him for direction, for every action, however trivial however unimportant, however much a matter of routine the action might seem to be. "Consecrate your thought, your speech, your action", he was saying in effect, ”by turning it over to God for direction".

Fortunately, he has infinite patience; and fortunately, he had many ways of teaching this lesson, and repeated opportunities to stress it, during his visit. But he had lost no time in getting down to fundamentals!

My own first interview with Baba was deferred until late that afternoon. I was chopping wood for the fireplace in his room when he passed, with Chanji, Ali, and, I think Meredith. He stopped and picked up a comb which had dropped, unnoticed, from my pocket. I was touched. Something warm stirred within me. I had had, as yet, almost no personal contact with Baba, but I knew that he was revered by thousands of people in India as a God-realized being, another Krishna. And here he was, noticing a lost comb, stooping to pick it out of the dust, handing it to me with a sunny smile! I thanked him, and he asked, in gestures, if I would like to join them for a walk.

We descended the long flight of narrow wooden steps that wound from the house to the private landing on the Croton River far below. The sun was setting as we reached the landing, and, in the still blue river was reflected the brown earth of the further shore, the dark green of the cypresses that rose from it, and long, streaming, feathery clouds, tinged with gold and rose and violet. We gazed for a moment, silently. Then Baba took the alphabet board out of his pocket, and turned to me. "I am God," he spelled out on the board, simply and directly.

Most Westerners would probably have thought themselves in the presence of a harmless lunatic. I had tried too long, however, to find God in myself and in everything I seemed to contact in phenomenal existence to object to anyone's expressed belief in the divine omnipresence. I was, if anything, not sufficiently impressed.

"I know," I answered, quietly, thinking to myself, "so am I."

I did not realize, then, the vast difference between Baba's constant experience of the indwelling divinity and my bland, intellectual assumption of it. But Baba did not mind. He knew my limitations, even if I didn't -- and he knew my potentialities, better then I did. That was why he had come, to help me to realize both. So he continued, patiently: "I am The Ancient One".

Baba, who never speaks an idle word, now was choosing his words with special care. He was suiting his language to the understanding of his hearer, as he later said he always