Dear folks of Baba, My computer is still being repaired and so I am handicapped in what I can do as far as writing goes. For this reason, I am sending out an exchange I witnessed years ago of a woman who was saying goodbye to Mehera at Meherazad. It was one of those pivotal moments for me in my inner life with Baba in what it conveyed about moods and detachment. Such priceless moments naturally occurred around Baba’s mandali without their necessarily knowing their profound impact. I hope you find it helpful as it was for me. LOVE MUST BE SOMETHING DIFFERENT I found that I absorbed in a very natural way many profound truths in being with the mandali. Here is one example. One deep insight came in a way that on the surface wouldn’t be obvious at all, and this happened one day at Meherazad with Baba’s Beloved Mehera. It was back in the early 1970s when I was young and immature in Baba. Mehera was standing on the porch of the Main House, saying goodbye to a young woman whose pilgrimage had come to an end; she was on her way back to the West. I was there just to say goodbye for the day before going back to Meherabad. Mehera lovingly encouraged the young woman to take Baba with her, not to worry, that Baba would take care of her, and at one point she surprised me, saying, “Sometimes we feel empty and depressed, but we know Baba wants us to be cheerful, so we make efforts to be cheerful.” This made a profound impression on me. I thought to myself, “She is the beloved of the Beloved, and for decades she has been next to the source of all Love, and yet she doesn’t always experience a joyous heart full of Baba’s love?” I concluded, "Then love must be something different from what I had thought.” For I experienced Mehera as the most loving person I had ever met, always radiating Baba’s love, and yet her experience in herself was not always of that love, but actually could be of emptiness. Up to that point, I took the feeling of Baba’s love in my heart as the sign that I was on the right track, Baba was with me; and when I would lose that feeling, I agonized over what I must have done wrong. I’d struggle to get the feeling back. Desperately. But after this small exchange with Mehera, I rarely ever worried again about how I was feeling. I never felt bad if I experienced emptiness or sunk into a low mood. I was able to see after this that love was on a different track altogether; it came from a different dimension within me. I would notice, for example, in times when I felt depressed or sad, my mood never prevented me from responding to a situation with love. Love was not dependent upon my mood or the state of my feelings. Nor did my moods take away from my love. Love was independent. And after that, I didn’t take it personally when I wasn’t experiencing Baba’s love in my heart. I would leave that up to His timing, and I would be deeply grateful when it happened. Baba once said, “Feelings and emotions are only the creation of energy and mind. Love is the creation of the soul.” Over time, I came to experience my consciousness, to use a metaphor, as the earth’s atmosphere, and moods and emotional states are like weather systems passing through it. If I identified with a raging storm in the atmosphere, I would be buffeted around by winds, but if I didn’t identify with the storm, it would pass through me much more quickly and I would not be pulled in. Years later, I began to see moods and emotional states like the seasons. It is not possible to stay in the springtime of moods like many spiritual groups advocate. Spring has to give way to summer where things heat up and a listlessness sets in. Then autumn comes and the natural world begins to shut down, the temperatures cool in a way that’s invigorating. But that doesn’t last. Winter comes, and everything dies back; there can be a feeling of emptiness and nature appears lifeless. These natural cycles are like the feelings and emotions moving naturally through us. And yet all the time, Baba’s love is behind the cycle of these emotional seasons, untouched, independent, ever accessible to us. It is like Mehera’s expansive, gentle and ever-embracing love, which she radiated so beautifully to us, even though she herself might be feeling sad and weary. How amazing that because of such a seemingly minor incident, with only a few words spoken, such a profound truth about moods and feelings was communicated, which has made such a difference in my life. But I know well, that Baba’s close mandali are completely linked to His divinity and so many deep truths naturally just flowed from them, whether they were aware of it or not. Later, I read where Baba had said to Arnavaz Dadachanji, who was complaining to Him that she wasn’t feeling Him, “I never said to feel me. I said to love me.” So true. In His love, Jeff We are continuing on page 105 A link to the PDF of Effort and Grace: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xrR75eksY-tErdKZm9aOBs3omuhioasb/view?usp=sharing
