THE GOD-MAN The Life, Journeys and Work of Meher Baba with an ...

THE UNIVERSAL MESSAGE 347put your full trust in me and try to hold on to me and to obey me till the very end. Are you prepared to doso? Reply direct to me short and to the point only. Apart from this one short reply you must notcorrespond with me or Eruch until otherwise informed.Replies were to be in not more than four lines. Thousands were received in due course and were read toBaba; each was acknowledged in a circular letter which said:Obedience is more than love. Love is a gift from the Beloved to the lover, whereas obedience is anoffering from the lover to the Beloved.Baba went to Poona in December, staying at Guruprasad until the middle of the following January. AnAmerican visitor, Ivy Duce, was permitted to visit him there, for five minutes.Early in February 1959 a visitor from the West came to see him at Meherabad. He said that he had cometo India to sit in meditation for a time near a shrine in Ajmer and desired to meditate on Baba in Baba'sphysical presence. He was told by Baba:Don't run away from the world: renounce your own lower self.Don't renounce the world: renounce your own lower self.Don't seek solitude anywhere but within your own self.Silently cry out within your own self, 'Beloved One, reveal yourselfto me as my own real infinite Self'.It is you who are obstructing yourself from finding your Self, so try to lose your lower self in continuedremembrance of God, who is your real Self.Don't become Master of disciples till you have mastered your own self.He spoke of meditation upon God, defining meditation as 'neither devotion nor love: meditation meansmental effort in pinning down the object of thought before one's mind's eye'.His birthday was not celebrated that year at Meherazad. He continued in what seemed slow, but was infact under ordinary circumstances rapid, progress towards recovery. He was in constant pain still, butthose who came to see him remarked on his radiance. At the beginning of March 1959 he went to thehome of Nariman Dadachanji in Bombay for a week, receiving people from 9 to 12 each morning,sometimes in the afternoon. Altogether some hundreds of people came,