love to Baba lay the path to selfless service and to love for its own sake—Universal Love. Coming to this understanding was in essence our daily awakening.

As Baba leads us along the path to spiritual freedom and Truth by freeing the soul from wants and its ego-bindings of selfishness, I find that the unconscious tension that existed before coming to Baba is now replaced by a conscious tension . . . the very essence of spiritual freedom, a tension between discipline and freedom.

To quote Baba again, "The beginning of real love is obedience, and the highest aspect of this love which surpasses that of love itself, is the aspect which culminates into the perfect obedience or supreme resignation to the will and wish of the Beloved (God)."

Through Baba, we became aware of much that hitherto we were ignorant of, which brought release, generosity and love in the heart. In the awakening of all this purified awareness, the disturbing petty awarenesses of ego-pride, ego-sensitiveness, ego-selfishness, ego-assertiveness, became less gnawing.

Baba helped us to realize the ego represented but a stage on the spiritual pilgrimage, and only by breaking out of its shell do we find freedom. At the same time, he showed us that the value of freeing the ego must proceed from love. Everything sought after, even if it be righteousness, knowledge, goodness, creates an attachment which can lead to self-righteousness and in this way, may feed the ego rather than free it, if it be not the outcome of love. The self-giving love, not the self-assertive love: a desire not for possession, but for Union . . .

After being away from Baba for several months and in another country, I became aware of another great change in outlook.

Previously I tended to look out on the world at large with the eye of a proud nationalist. Today it is with the broader, more sympathetic eye of an internationalist. Living with Baba was to live at the Centre of the Universe; each nation, each individual, equidistant from its Centre, Baba.

I recall a small incident during the second World War when we were sitting with Baba on the verandah, and the war was under discussion. In an arrogant mood, I blurted out, "What am I doing for my country? How much more I could do if I were in England!"

Baba apparently took me seriously. He told Elizabeth to phone to Bombay and book me a passage to Europe, and sent me to pack my bedding roll, telling Margaret Craske and Rano to assist me. Meanwhile, both girls tried to knock a little sense into my stubborn head. Needless to say, I did not go. Such was my poor understanding, in those early days, of Baba and his universal work.

Our basic sanskaras, lust, greed, anger, arising from the whole evolutionary process, are, as Margaret points out so clearly, supplemented in the human form by an additional sanskara, namely of pride, the most insidious of all, especially when it takes on the aspect of pride of country and of race.

It is when you come up against individuals of other countries by living with them as we did in Baba's ashram, that this pride asserts itself. When challenged, you stand up for your