Baba asked Jim, “How did you sleep last night?”
“Pretty well,” Jim answered.
“What are your plans?”
Jim said, “I am leaving India shortly to return to America to go back to school. I’m taking a train from Poona at 3:00 P.M. for Bombay.”
“I am happy to hear this. Don’t miss your train. When you get back to the States write one letter to me.” Then Baba said, “Do you have any questions?”
Jim was caught off guard. It had never occurred to him that the Avatar would ask him if he had any questions for him. He couldn’t think of a thing. His mind was a total blank. However, he had written a small poem for Baba which he held out to him. Baba told him to read it which Jim did as follows:
Ignorance of You is despair.
Knowledge of You is hope.
Love of You is happiness
Service for You is nobility.
Obedience to You is bliss.
From the back of the room, Francis boomed out, “Here, here!” at the last line, which Baba said he liked the best.
Jim continues his recollections of the meeting:
At this point in the interview I was bewildered, albeit happily bewildered. Nothing which I had expected to happen had happened. I had expected a serious and “spiritual” Master; I met a loving, almost informal, very human man, one who was genuinely and deeply concerned about small, everyday things and about people. In addition to Baba-the-man, there was Baba-the God, whose presence permeated the room. Despite the fact that Baba carried on a full and responsive conversation with me, there was a deep, non-verbal communication going on between him and the mandali in the back of the room. Love flowed from Baba like a waterfall. It went to all corners of the room, irrespective of people to receive it. The reason that the mandali could receive more of Baba’s love than I, was simply that they were more empty of the world than I was.
Baba had Jim stand up and he introduced him to his brother Jal. Baba explained, “Jal will show you around Poona.” He quipped, “The townspeople will be much amused at the sight of a tall American and a short Indian.”
Francis piped up, “That’s the long and the short of it, Baba.”
Baba joked, “Jal’s growth has been stunted!”
In the end Baba told Jim:
What you are looking for is God, but God is not this physical form [of Baba] that you see before you. God is inside yourself. Remember that God is inside everyone and everything.. And God is in your schedule, your train and in your going back to school.”
Baba then said, “If you remain true to the last line of your poem, you will one day see me as I really am.”
Says Jim:
I had never in all my born days ever thought of being able to see God as he really was — I wasn’t even in the ball game! I thought that was beyond me. And I wasn’t even striving for that. Yet there he was, focusing my attention on the Goal. I had gone in with so many misunderstandings of who he was and what the Goal was, and in those short minutes Baba gave me an example and helped me to know so many things.
Baba called Jim to him, embraced and kissed him and sent him out. Jim spent the rest of the morning seeing the various Baba spots around Poona with Jal and then left, returning to America on May 1. He concludes:
My strongest memory of that interview is the memory of Baba’s presence. Somehow, without saying it, he communicated to me that he loves me through and through, that I can trust him and that anything — literally anything — is worth enduring and suffering and working through for the experience of the bliss which he experiences continually and eternally. Somehow Baba had made me know one thing: at the end of the road, which is him, is something phenomenally beautiful.
Baba awakened something in me which knew that.
I can understand how the masts throw away their very lives for him. I can understand why the close disciples want nothing more than to return to be with him, to love him and to serve him. A taste of the Wine of his love has made me thirsty for the entire keg. How I long for the day when I can see him as he really is.
In the letter he wrote to Baba Jim said, “I hope that I will one day be big enough to be nothing.”
Through Adi, Baba responded, “One day you will be.”
–www.lordmeher.org, p6441