Here is how Filis [Frederick ] described that first meeting with Baba after four years:
When I walked into the inner hall, the first thing I saw from afar was the white light beaming from Baba’s eyes — it seemed soft and brilliant as a sun, and of all the glimpses of the Beloved that came afterward in the crowded sahavas calendar, I still remember that first marvelous nazar or glance of Baba. He was seated alone on the couch, dressed in his dear, familiar pink jacket and white sadra. [p4831]
When Jeanne Shaw’s turn came to greet Baba, she fell on her knees to embrace him, and Baba hugged her for a long while. He questioned her about her heart attack. “How long before the sahavas did it happen?” Jeanne said four days. Baba was pleased that she had been brave enough to come. She began to sob with great love, and Baba took her face between his hands and kissed her cheek. She kissed him back. Her earring fell off in Baba’s lap, and he picked it up and handed it back to her, kissing her again.
As others came in and embraced Baba and the women mandali, Jeanne later recalled:
“It was really one of, if not the, happiest days of my life. There was so much joy, the very air was vibrating with it, and I felt myself vibrating with the waves of love. I felt warm, tearful, joyful, as did several of the women.” [p4832]
Gary Mullins, 22, had found out about Baba in San Francisco one year before from a chance encounter with Ivy Duce (he picked up a package she had dropped on the street!): “Baba appeared like a perfect rose. He was the most beautiful human being I had ever seen in my life. [Meeting him] was an experience of aesthetic perfection.”
As Eruch called his name, Gary came forward:
I would give up everything in life, and I mean everything, if I could experience, once again, those few moments when I first met Meher Baba. It is my supreme memory of being with him while in India…We were being introduced to Baba by Eruch…Baba, sitting on his couch, beckoned for me to come to him — so simply, so childlike, and so far beyond any words I could possibly create.
I walked to him and he reached up and pulled me down in an embrace that is forever. I experienced his hug as the essence of intimacy. At the same time, his embrace was perfectly impersonal. For a few seconds, I was simply in another world, in a tranquil pink and blue cloud, in a sky far, far higher than words can convey. Although only a faint glimmer then, but now a fuller intensity, I experienced something coming from Baba that was precisely what I had felt as a child sitting on that street curb in San Diego, realizing my father had come home from the war in the South Pacific. It was overwhelming radiance and the fullness of love. For one eternal moment, which grows richer with each passing year, I was at home with my real father, Avatar Meher Baba. [p4834]
-www.lordmeher.org, p4831, p4832, p4834
Oct, 1962;Â East-West Gathering, Guruprasad