Volume 21 Number 1 Page 19

outstanding impression of the first meeting is one of peering into bottomless pools of infinite love and tenderness, as my eyes met His. My heart pounded with tremendous excitement and for a while I could not speak. I felt that in an inexplicable way He was the reason for my very existence; that I had never really lived until this moment; that He was deeply familiar and precious to me, even as I was no stranger and very dear to Him." When I asked how she felt on that special day, Jean said: "It is beyond words."

In 1932, the Schloss’s were reunited with Baba and traveled with Him to Hollywood. Baba visited Hollywood once more in 1934, and after two and a half years of separation, which included many trials, Jean and Malcolm found their way to their Beloved's embrace. In December 1936, they docked in Bombay to join a party of twenty disciples from the West, living under Baba's supervision at the Nasik ashram. On one occasion, during that same period of time, Baba nicknamed Jean, 'the jewel'. In America, she was part of a group of women better known as 'Jeanco', consisting of Elizabeth Patterson, Nadine Tolstoy, Norina Matchabelli, and Anita de Caro (Vieillard). Baba said that 'Jeanco' was of His Circle which He explains as follows: "The Circle means those deeply connected disciples who are unconsciously one with Me now and will 'consciously' be one with Me in future, when I have completed the work which I can do during the period of their apparent ignorance." At the end of July, 1937, some of the group, including the Schloss’s, sailed to Cannes. It was at the end of this stay that Baba said to Jean, "I push you away, then I draw you close; again I push you off and draw you even closer; now I push you far away and the next time I draw you back to Me it will be to remain one with my Universal Self forever." Jean and Malcolm journeyed back to New York in November, 1937. A few years after returning from Europe, they went their separate ways. Of the break-up, Jean said: "There were no quarrels or anything like that. We just sort of withdrew." Laughingly, she added: "I didn't want to be with him, and he didn't want to be with me!"

In July, 1948, Jean and Delia de Leon traveled to India upon Baba's request. This reunion was to be a relatively short one and Jean returned to America before the year was over.

After her stay in India, Jean came back to America and slowly began drifting away from Baba; she experienced illuminations from the inner planes which ultimately brought her confusion, self-delusion, despair, and physical suffering. It is not my intention nor in my power to analyze what actually took place in Jean's life at that time. I can only relate, as tears flowed from her eyes, how she finally felt about that painful period: "There will never be another departure. All of it has been an agony for me because it was all as a 'threeness'. I never doubted Baba. I never felt apart from Baba, but I've had terrific periods when there was 'something' I could not understand; then 'it' gradually lifted until now. It's not the real thing. Now, it's over". And she forcefully added: "This 'thing' has no meaning to me whatsoever. Absolutely none!"

In a letter dictated by Baba for Jean, we find the following statement: "I know how this period of inactivity, of ‘silent submission' is more torturing than the one of constant move and activity, but those whose thought every moment is on your darling Baba — I need hardly say more . . . All you have passed through and have yet to pass through is part of the plan or process that brings you closer every moment to Me."

Two days had quickly gone by and it was time to say farewell. This is how Jean concluded: "I have always been with Him and I always will be. He is everything. I know that I’m going home and I know that I'm going to be with Baba. It's no longer up to me except that I know that everything that happens is according to the Divine Will and is Baba."